5 ms·

Microsoft is about to launch free Xbox Cloud Gaming with ads

41 points by avonmach 1y ago

uptown 1y ago
They just jacked up the price of GamePass ultimate from $20 to $30 a month, so I guess they feel they'll earn more from ad revenue than from subscription revenue if they're pushing users that direction.
- vitorgrs 1y ago
  In Brazil it went from R$ 59,90 to R$ 119,90. Double.
wincy 1y ago
Imagine trying to play Elden Ring, you’re on the final boss, at half health, and suddenly you get an overlay autoplaying ad for Domino’s Pizza. Or you’re holding back tears as a beloved character makes the ultimate sacrifice in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the orchestral soundtrack crescendos in a perfect welling up of complex emotional storytelling, as you get an ad for Dude Wipes. DUDE WIPES: WIPES FOR EVERY DAY SH*TUATIONS. GET 20% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER WITH CODE SHITBOX
- charcircuit 1y ago
  >two minutes of preroll ads before a game is available to stream Preroll ads play before the game. I also imagine there could be queue to play which makes it the perfect time to show ads.
  - fabian2k 1y ago
    I think it is safe to assume they'll start with a lower level of ads and will increase that later. This always works out the same way.
  - wincy 1y ago
    I know, but that’s not funny and doesn’t let me make a joke about Dude Wipes in the same breath as Clair Obscur (a fantastic game). I remember being broke and having a person I barely knew buy me Diablo 3. I definitely would have used this experience 15 years ago. I’m not actually opposed to it, but it is funny to imagine a depraved utopia where truly nothing is sacred, furthermore these jokes serve as a way to inoculate ourselves against reaching that technologically possible but hopefully ethically dubious destination.
  - brendoelfrendo 1y ago
    I refuse to believe that more ads won't be forthcoming. Perhaps they enforce a time limit on play sessions and require more ads to resume, or leverage their position as a cloud service to seamlessly halt the game, insert a midroll ad, and dump you back into whatever you were doing (after an on-screen timer gives you adequate warning to avoid heavy action, of course).
- cnity 1y ago
  Just drink a verification can before the boss fight to freeze ads for 30 minutes.
- AdmiralAsshat 1y ago
  https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/714/117/28c.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/714/117/28c... Humanity is pretty good at predicting dystopian futures, we always just struggle with the timeline.
- mielioort 1y ago
  [dead]
glimshe 1y ago
It used to be the case that you saved for months to buy a game but got a pretty box with a luxurious, professionally written manual and a game that would keep you busy for a while. Fully immersive with no updates and subscriptions needed. Someone, please bring gaming back...
- ibero 1y ago
  the sea change is people now play the same video game for hundreds of hours on end. the old razor blades business model breaks down when people keep their razor blade for years.
  - jerlam 1y ago
    Aren't microtransactions, loot boxes, and gacha the "give away the handle, sell expensive razor blades" business model?
    - polski-g 1y ago
      I have about 3200 hours in EU4, a ten year old game. But I also have $400 in its DLC (all of them). But the thought of paying $30/mo to play a game is just too much. I only buy 2-3 games+DLCs per year. Game Pass was fine when it was $5/mo, I could leave it on in the background and not care if it wasn't utilized.
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  And that's relevant to renting a gaming device how?
ndiddy 1y ago
Microsoft's whole plan with Game Pass was that by buying up half the industry they'd get enough subscribers to justify the massive expense of buying and funding all those studios, but subscriber growth went flat far sooner than they expected. It's bad enough that Microsoft hasn't updated the official subscriber figures since 2024, but from a former Game Pass manager's figures on LinkedIn it's only grown from 34 million subscribers in 2024 to 35 million this year. I imagine this new free plan is a ploy to increase the number of subscribers they can report so Game Pass looks like less of a disaster. To compare, there's at least 10 million fewer Game Pass subscribers now than there were Xbox Live subscribers in 2015 (48 million). This is a fair comparison to make because Xbox Live got rolled into Game Pass a couple years ago (called Game Pass Core) as part of a previous attempt to juice the Game Pass subscriber numbers. For one example of how Game Pass affects game sales, Microsoft internally estimated they lost $300 million in sales of Call of Duty Black Ops 6, the first Call of Duty game they published after buying Activision, due to Game Pass (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-03/xbox-s-game-pass-hike-shows-cost-of-lost-call-of-duty-sales https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-03/xbox-s-ga...). They would have needed 15 million new subscribers for 1 month, or 1.25 million subscribers for 1 year, to make up the difference in lost sales. I don't think it's any wonder that we're seeing Microsoft hike the price on Game Pass and lay off thousands of game developers. I just wish they'd thought through all this beforehand so we could have avoided messing up all these people's livelihoods for what is a fundamentally bad idea (selling $60-70 games on a $15-$20 subscription).
- eighthourblink 1y ago
  Good information in this comment regarding the situation, thanks
- microtonal 1y ago
  It's not surprising that game pass is failing. We got an Xbox Series X over Playstation because of Game Pass. We subscribed to Game Pass Ultimate in April 2023 for 12.99 Euro per month. Now little over two years later, the same subscription is 26.99 Euro (more than doubled). It's great that it has quite a lot of games, but in practice we only played a small number of titles. This was fine for the original price, the benefit over buying games was that you could try more titles before choosing what you like to play. But we are certainly not going to pay 26.99 monthly for games that you do not own in the end. It kind of feels gross/bait-and-switch'y. In the meanwhile the Xbox is collecting dust we got a Switch 2. Sure, Switch 2 titles are expensive, but at least you own them.
John7878781 1y ago
People are going to inevitably hate on this because... well it's ads. But in my opinion, having an ad-supported tier is actually a good thing. It makes gaming more accessible to people who can't afford/don't want to purchase expensive gaming PCs. Plus, it adds competition with nvidia's geforce streaming service (which is already ad-supported).
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  That's just the first-order effects. Ads inevitably corrupt the mediums they exist in. The canonical/obvious example is cliffhangers before ad breaks in shows intended for broadcast TV. I don't think it's a coincidence that the era of "prestige TV" started on HBO and other ad-free networks that were not constrained by making room for ad spots in their scripts. We'll see how ads will warp gaming as ad-based monetization proliferates, but given that it's an interactive medium it could be very intrusive.
  - brendoelfrendo 1y ago
    I feel like the obvious analogue is to ad-supported platforms like YouTube and how convoluted self-censorship strategies are necessary to stay monetized. If you're an indie dev and you were hoping to get your next game on GamePass, but you can't afford to miss out on the ad-supported tier, do you start changing your game to make it more appealing to advertisers?
  - jerf 1y ago
    I'm not sure it can warp it any farther than gambling loot box and gacha mechanics already have. I'm not just being ambiently sarcastic, I'm being quite serious, outright gambling strikes me as being a more potent force on the game by quite a bit than advertising would be.
- xinayder 1y ago
  Wait until it has a 30ms input latency and 480p resolution. That's not accessible, that's just enshittification. Like Google has done with YouTube: you can no longer watch HD videos if you don't have Premium. You can select 720p or 1080p, but the video won't be HD.
sylens 1y ago
They have been lighting their goodwill with the hardcore gaming community on fire over this past year. I can't imagine there is anyone out there that would advocate for XBox Cloud Gaming over GeForce Now at this point.
mrweasel 1y ago
This is starting to become really weird. How much can ads actually fund? The quality of the ads and the products they sell are both going straight down. If we filter out ads for various subscriptions to other apps and game, as well as down right scams, we left with Temu ads and the occasional ads for the local supermarket. There has to be a limit to how much honest companies can fund via ads and I think we're way past that limit.
- myrmidon 1y ago
  Adding up the big "ad-based" companies (google, meta) gets into the double digit percentages of US GDP (and those companies also do some useful non-ad things, too). That sounds like a lot considering it is mostly a zero-sum waste, but I think it is still somewhat reasonable, and the trend was clear even decades ago (just think newspaper, radio, TV ads). I think it would be feasible for the ad industry to leach even more ressources, but not too much more; I would not expect the sector to be able to double in relative size.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >Adding up the big "ad-based" companies (google, meta) gets into the double digit percentages of US GDP (and those companies also do some useful non-ad things, too). this comparison is meaningless because you're comparing market cap (stock) with GDP (flow). If you only compare revenue and GDP you get a far more modest 1.7%, and even that's misleading because you're comparing global advertising revenue with the production of one country.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    Considering roughly half of US ad spend is pharma alone... I'm not sure that it is possible to grow or not... in either case, it's kind of icky IMO.
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    My thinking is just that having so many services ads funded means that companies like Google and Meta will never ever show a company that their ad spending yielded no measurable result. If some of the larger buyers of ad space started pull back their spending, because it's generating results, multiple industries would just collapse. I think we've reach the point where actual honest consumer products have peeked in terms of ad spend, and that's why we're seeing so many ads to garbage products and addictive online games. The "good" ads dried out long ago, and now we're more or less just scamming weak and addicted people.
post_break 1y ago
We're so close to "please drink a verification can" green text from 4chan.
- rootsudo 1y ago
  Makes you wonder, they can implement it now easier then ever.
- magixx 1y ago
  Didn't we already get there with Mountain Dew [1] and Pure Kick [2]? [1] https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/10/05/snack-with-doritos-mtn-dew-and-rockstar-gaming-rewards/ https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/10/05/snack-with-doritos-mt... [2] https://www.purekick.com/products/forza-fuel https://www.purekick.com/products/forza-fuel
pr337h4m 1y ago
Come on, this is obviously a great thing. A lot of kids are gonna be super happy once this launches.
lenerdenator 1y ago
Video gaming is the mess that it is in 2025 because the market allows for it. If you can commoditize nostalgia, people who really should not be paying you money will gladly do so. How many of us have more games in our Steam libraries, bought during a sale ("It was only $7, how could I resist?!") than we could reasonably hope to enjoy in a human lifetime? How many Game Pass subscriptions are actively used vs. just forgotten about and drawing revenue on auto-renew and autopay? How many people regularly comment online about how anti-consumer Nintendo has gotten with their IP lawsuits and remastered game sales, only to gladly preorder those same games on the new console? Vote with your wallet.
- user432678 1y ago
  My nostalgia levels and annoyance of modern remakes market finally made me to buy Windows 98 machine and spend £5 per original CD on eBay with games I wanted to re-experience.
- myrmidon 1y ago
  > Video gaming is the mess that it is in 2025 Is it though? IMO video gaming is fine, in a great spot, even. Consumer prices have stayed (unreasonably!) cheap for decades and especially the indie market is thriving right now. I remember paying more for games 15 years ago than I do now. But I primarily play indie titles on Steam (currently Silksong), so that might warp my perspective. Regarding commoditized nostalgia: I don't think pricing is that unreasonable. For instance, I'm pretty happy with the current state of Age of Empires 2.
  - kbolino 1y ago
    > For instance, I'm pretty happy with the current state of Age of Empires 2. Terrible example IMO. Microsoft has both disabled new purchases of "traditional" Age of Empires 2 on Steam and also spitefully patched out offline LAN play. So when I can get enough people together about once a year to have a LAN party and we want to play AoE2 it's either everybody pays $35 each for the "definitive" edition, so we can play for just a couple hours, or else we just don't play it at all because not everybody even has a Steam account never mind their own gaming computer. And Steam also nuked the ability to buy multiple copies of a game when it's on sale and keep them to give as gifts later. To compound this, because I only own the old edition (that nobody can buy anymore) and not the new one, I can't even leave a negative review (where it will actually be seen) warning people of Microsoft's shitty behavior.
dfedbeef 1y ago
The Xbox has games that are all kind of samey. Giving people access to all of them at once probably hurt the platform more than it helped.
0xC0ncord 1y ago
If this scales to more titles I'm curious how it's intended to work. The article writes that the current internal test has preroll ads before the game streaming begins. So, if I start playing a game and the system decides it's time for me to watch more ads, how does it handle the game I am playing? Does the game pause? What about in the middle of an intense fight? What if it's during an unpause-able section? What if it's a multiplayer game? With these questions in mind I have a hard time understanding how this will end up working in the long run without completely ruining the experience.
tristor 1y ago
I recently got informed that my Game Pass subscription is going to go from $19.99/mo to $29.99/mo, paid annually, which is a $10/mo or $120/yr increase for the exact same service. I wonder how much of this price increase was intended to subsidize free users beyond the ads, or how much is just a naked money-grab because they can't increase the subscriber base so they're juicing existing subscribers for more.

41 points by avonmach 1y ago

They just jacked up the price of GamePass ultimate from $20 to $30 a month, so I guess they feel they'll earn more from ad revenue than from subscription revenue if they're pushing users that direction.

vitorgrs 1y ago
In Brazil it went from R$ 59,90 to R$ 119,90. Double.

wincy 1y ago

Imagine trying to play Elden Ring, you’re on the final boss, at half health, and suddenly you get an overlay autoplaying ad for Domino’s Pizza. Or you’re holding back tears as a beloved character makes the ultimate sacrifice in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the orchestral soundtrack crescendos in a perfect welling up of complex emotional storytelling, as you get an ad for Dude Wipes. DUDE WIPES: WIPES FOR EVERY DAY SH*TUATIONS. GET 20% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER WITH CODE SHITBOX

charcircuit 1y ago
>two minutes of preroll ads before a game is available to stream Preroll ads play before the game. I also imagine there could be queue to play which makes it the perfect time to show ads.
- fabian2k 1y ago
  I think it is safe to assume they'll start with a lower level of ads and will increase that later. This always works out the same way.
- wincy 1y ago
  I know, but that’s not funny and doesn’t let me make a joke about Dude Wipes in the same breath as Clair Obscur (a fantastic game). I remember being broke and having a person I barely knew buy me Diablo 3. I definitely would have used this experience 15 years ago. I’m not actually opposed to it, but it is funny to imagine a depraved utopia where truly nothing is sacred, furthermore these jokes serve as a way to inoculate ourselves against reaching that technologically possible but hopefully ethically dubious destination.
- brendoelfrendo 1y ago
  I refuse to believe that more ads won't be forthcoming. Perhaps they enforce a time limit on play sessions and require more ads to resume, or leverage their position as a cloud service to seamlessly halt the game, insert a midroll ad, and dump you back into whatever you were doing (after an on-screen timer gives you adequate warning to avoid heavy action, of course).
cnity 1y ago
Just drink a verification can before the boss fight to freeze ads for 30 minutes.
AdmiralAsshat 1y ago
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/714/117/28c.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/714/117/28c... Humanity is pretty good at predicting dystopian futures, we always just struggle with the timeline.
mielioort 1y ago
[dead]

glimshe 1y ago

It used to be the case that you saved for months to buy a game but got a pretty box with a luxurious, professionally written manual and a game that would keep you busy for a while. Fully immersive with no updates and subscriptions needed. Someone, please bring gaming back...

ibero 1y ago
the sea change is people now play the same video game for hundreds of hours on end. the old razor blades business model breaks down when people keep their razor blade for years.
- jerlam 1y ago
  Aren't microtransactions, loot boxes, and gacha the "give away the handle, sell expensive razor blades" business model?
  - polski-g 1y ago
    I have about 3200 hours in EU4, a ten year old game. But I also have $400 in its DLC (all of them). But the thought of paying $30/mo to play a game is just too much. I only buy 2-3 games+DLCs per year. Game Pass was fine when it was $5/mo, I could leave it on in the background and not care if it wasn't utilized.
TiredOfLife 1y ago
And that's relevant to renting a gaming device how?

ndiddy 1y ago

Microsoft's whole plan with Game Pass was that by buying up half the industry they'd get enough subscribers to justify the massive expense of buying and funding all those studios, but subscriber growth went flat far sooner than they expected. It's bad enough that Microsoft hasn't updated the official subscriber figures since 2024, but from a former Game Pass manager's figures on LinkedIn it's only grown from 34 million subscribers in 2024 to 35 million this year. I imagine this new free plan is a ploy to increase the number of subscribers they can report so Game Pass looks like less of a disaster. To compare, there's at least 10 million fewer Game Pass subscribers now than there were Xbox Live subscribers in 2015 (48 million). This is a fair comparison to make because Xbox Live got rolled into Game Pass a couple years ago (called Game Pass Core) as part of a previous attempt to juice the Game Pass subscriber numbers. For one example of how Game Pass affects game sales, Microsoft internally estimated they lost $300 million in sales of Call of Duty Black Ops 6, the first Call of Duty game they published after buying Activision, due to Game Pass (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-03/xbox-s-game-pass-hike-shows-cost-of-lost-call-of-duty-sales https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-03/xbox-s-ga...). They would have needed 15 million new subscribers for 1 month, or 1.25 million subscribers for 1 year, to make up the difference in lost sales. I don't think it's any wonder that we're seeing Microsoft hike the price on Game Pass and lay off thousands of game developers. I just wish they'd thought through all this beforehand so we could have avoided messing up all these people's livelihoods for what is a fundamentally bad idea (selling $60-70 games on a $15-$20 subscription).

eighthourblink 1y ago
Good information in this comment regarding the situation, thanks
microtonal 1y ago
It's not surprising that game pass is failing. We got an Xbox Series X over Playstation because of Game Pass. We subscribed to Game Pass Ultimate in April 2023 for 12.99 Euro per month. Now little over two years later, the same subscription is 26.99 Euro (more than doubled). It's great that it has quite a lot of games, but in practice we only played a small number of titles. This was fine for the original price, the benefit over buying games was that you could try more titles before choosing what you like to play. But we are certainly not going to pay 26.99 monthly for games that you do not own in the end. It kind of feels gross/bait-and-switch'y. In the meanwhile the Xbox is collecting dust we got a Switch 2. Sure, Switch 2 titles are expensive, but at least you own them.

John7878781 1y ago

People are going to inevitably hate on this because... well it's ads. But in my opinion, having an ad-supported tier is actually a good thing. It makes gaming more accessible to people who can't afford/don't want to purchase expensive gaming PCs. Plus, it adds competition with nvidia's geforce streaming service (which is already ad-supported).

AlexandrB 1y ago
That's just the first-order effects. Ads inevitably corrupt the mediums they exist in. The canonical/obvious example is cliffhangers before ad breaks in shows intended for broadcast TV. I don't think it's a coincidence that the era of "prestige TV" started on HBO and other ad-free networks that were not constrained by making room for ad spots in their scripts. We'll see how ads will warp gaming as ad-based monetization proliferates, but given that it's an interactive medium it could be very intrusive.
- brendoelfrendo 1y ago
  I feel like the obvious analogue is to ad-supported platforms like YouTube and how convoluted self-censorship strategies are necessary to stay monetized. If you're an indie dev and you were hoping to get your next game on GamePass, but you can't afford to miss out on the ad-supported tier, do you start changing your game to make it more appealing to advertisers?
- jerf 1y ago
  I'm not sure it can warp it any farther than gambling loot box and gacha mechanics already have. I'm not just being ambiently sarcastic, I'm being quite serious, outright gambling strikes me as being a more potent force on the game by quite a bit than advertising would be.
xinayder 1y ago
Wait until it has a 30ms input latency and 480p resolution. That's not accessible, that's just enshittification. Like Google has done with YouTube: you can no longer watch HD videos if you don't have Premium. You can select 720p or 1080p, but the video won't be HD.

sylens 1y ago

They have been lighting their goodwill with the hardcore gaming community on fire over this past year. I can't imagine there is anyone out there that would advocate for XBox Cloud Gaming over GeForce Now at this point.

mrweasel 1y ago

This is starting to become really weird. How much can ads actually fund? The quality of the ads and the products they sell are both going straight down. If we filter out ads for various subscriptions to other apps and game, as well as down right scams, we left with Temu ads and the occasional ads for the local supermarket. There has to be a limit to how much honest companies can fund via ads and I think we're way past that limit.

myrmidon 1y ago
Adding up the big "ad-based" companies (google, meta) gets into the double digit percentages of US GDP (and those companies also do some useful non-ad things, too). That sounds like a lot considering it is mostly a zero-sum waste, but I think it is still somewhat reasonable, and the trend was clear even decades ago (just think newspaper, radio, TV ads). I think it would be feasible for the ad industry to leach even more ressources, but not too much more; I would not expect the sector to be able to double in relative size.
- gruez 1y ago
  >Adding up the big "ad-based" companies (google, meta) gets into the double digit percentages of US GDP (and those companies also do some useful non-ad things, too). this comparison is meaningless because you're comparing market cap (stock) with GDP (flow). If you only compare revenue and GDP you get a far more modest 1.7%, and even that's misleading because you're comparing global advertising revenue with the production of one country.
- tracker1 1y ago
  Considering roughly half of US ad spend is pharma alone... I'm not sure that it is possible to grow or not... in either case, it's kind of icky IMO.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  My thinking is just that having so many services ads funded means that companies like Google and Meta will never ever show a company that their ad spending yielded no measurable result. If some of the larger buyers of ad space started pull back their spending, because it's generating results, multiple industries would just collapse. I think we've reach the point where actual honest consumer products have peeked in terms of ad spend, and that's why we're seeing so many ads to garbage products and addictive online games. The "good" ads dried out long ago, and now we're more or less just scamming weak and addicted people.

post_break 1y ago

We're so close to "please drink a verification can" green text from 4chan.

rootsudo 1y ago
Makes you wonder, they can implement it now easier then ever.
magixx 1y ago
Didn't we already get there with Mountain Dew [1] and Pure Kick [2]? [1] https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/10/05/snack-with-doritos-mtn-dew-and-rockstar-gaming-rewards/ https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/10/05/snack-with-doritos-mt... [2] https://www.purekick.com/products/forza-fuel https://www.purekick.com/products/forza-fuel

pr337h4m 1y ago

Come on, this is obviously a great thing. A lot of kids are gonna be super happy once this launches.

lenerdenator 1y ago

Video gaming is the mess that it is in 2025 because the market allows for it. If you can commoditize nostalgia, people who really should not be paying you money will gladly do so. How many of us have more games in our Steam libraries, bought during a sale ("It was only $7, how could I resist?!") than we could reasonably hope to enjoy in a human lifetime? How many Game Pass subscriptions are actively used vs. just forgotten about and drawing revenue on auto-renew and autopay? How many people regularly comment online about how anti-consumer Nintendo has gotten with their IP lawsuits and remastered game sales, only to gladly preorder those same games on the new console? Vote with your wallet.

user432678 1y ago
My nostalgia levels and annoyance of modern remakes market finally made me to buy Windows 98 machine and spend £5 per original CD on eBay with games I wanted to re-experience.
myrmidon 1y ago
> Video gaming is the mess that it is in 2025 Is it though? IMO video gaming is fine, in a great spot, even. Consumer prices have stayed (unreasonably!) cheap for decades and especially the indie market is thriving right now. I remember paying more for games 15 years ago than I do now. But I primarily play indie titles on Steam (currently Silksong), so that might warp my perspective. Regarding commoditized nostalgia: I don't think pricing is that unreasonable. For instance, I'm pretty happy with the current state of Age of Empires 2.
- kbolino 1y ago
  > For instance, I'm pretty happy with the current state of Age of Empires 2. Terrible example IMO. Microsoft has both disabled new purchases of "traditional" Age of Empires 2 on Steam and also spitefully patched out offline LAN play. So when I can get enough people together about once a year to have a LAN party and we want to play AoE2 it's either everybody pays $35 each for the "definitive" edition, so we can play for just a couple hours, or else we just don't play it at all because not everybody even has a Steam account never mind their own gaming computer. And Steam also nuked the ability to buy multiple copies of a game when it's on sale and keep them to give as gifts later. To compound this, because I only own the old edition (that nobody can buy anymore) and not the new one, I can't even leave a negative review (where it will actually be seen) warning people of Microsoft's shitty behavior.

dfedbeef 1y ago

The Xbox has games that are all kind of samey. Giving people access to all of them at once probably hurt the platform more than it helped.

0xC0ncord 1y ago

If this scales to more titles I'm curious how it's intended to work. The article writes that the current internal test has preroll ads before the game streaming begins. So, if I start playing a game and the system decides it's time for me to watch more ads, how does it handle the game I am playing? Does the game pause? What about in the middle of an intense fight? What if it's during an unpause-able section? What if it's a multiplayer game? With these questions in mind I have a hard time understanding how this will end up working in the long run without completely ruining the experience.

tristor 1y ago

I recently got informed that my Game Pass subscription is going to go from $19.99/mo to $29.99/mo, paid annually, which is a $10/mo or $120/yr increase for the exact same service. I wonder how much of this price increase was intended to subsidize free users beyond the ads, or how much is just a naked money-grab because they can't increase the subscriber base so they're juicing existing subscribers for more.