Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part? There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware. This pricing is for renting the GPUs, same as GeForce Now and plenty of other services. And it's a pretty solid deal for people who don't want to build a multi-thousand dollar rig for gaming 10-20 hours a week.
littlecranky67 10 hours ago [-]
GeforceNow is actually a weird service - you don't only rent the GPU. Nvidia needs to have a licensing deal with the game publisher you want to play (the game you already own). They removed quite a lot of games, because big names like ActivisionBlizzard, 2K and Bethesda withdrew licensing agreements. If I only rent hardware, I don't think I need permission by the IP holder whose software I intend to run there.
colinmarc 4 hours ago [-]
This is somewhat incorrect.
It's a bit of a grey area, and it's not true that Nvidia needs to have a licensing deal. It's definitely against the license terms you get when you purchase a game through steam to run it on arbitrary hardware, but most (at least EU) courts would probably hold that if you own a game, you can run it on any hardware you have access to.
What happened was that when Nvidia just got started, they had an opt-out framework (for developers) instead of opt-in. At the time, some game developers felt like Nvidia was profiting off of their work unfairly, and posted publicly about it, and there was a decent-sized backlash.
However, in the meantime, other competing streaming platforms have gone with opt-out and there hasn't been much of an issue around it. I think most developers have come around to the idea that it increases game sales.
limagnolia 2 hours ago [-]
> It's definitely against the license terms you get when you purchase a game through steam to run it on arbitrary hardware
Is it??? I don't see anything in the Steam agreement about what hardware I am using?
nsxwolf 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah I don't understand this. It prevents me from running multiple simultaneous instances of a game, but I have Steam on a million random PCs and Macs and I've never noticed that I had to link a hardware fingerprint or approve a device or something.
colinmarc 1 hours ago [-]
IANAL.
Here's a random example from the Skyrim EULA:
[You may] use one copy of the Software for your personal, non-commercial use on a single home or portable console or computer.
...
[You agree not to] use or install the Software (or permit others to do same) on a network, for on-line use
...
Installation on a network server is strictly prohibited, and this Agreement shall not serve as a network license in any manner.
sgjohnson 51 minutes ago [-]
> use on a single home or portable console or computer.
Is this even legally enforceable? Technically I'd be in violation if I was playing the same copy of Skyrim on both my PC and my Steam Deck.
IANAL, but if it was ever tried, surely the clause would be struck down as invalid?
littlecranky67 1 hours ago [-]
GeforceNow renting you hardware is a so called third party. Why would I, who is renting out hardware, care for the licensing terms my clients have.
Btw you are also free to violate the license agreement between you and Bethesda - in a lot of cases, national law precedes licensing agreements. And often because there is no consequence for you violating it. I.e.
I also violate Youtubes ToS by using adblock - so what?
less_less 13 minutes ago [-]
I'm not a lawyer. But IIUC, they probably care because of issues like contributory or vicarious copyright infringement, at least in the US.
If they are providing you a service through which you infringe someone's copyright (by playing a video game in violation of its licensing agreement) in exchange for giving them money, then they are risking a lawsuit. If they knowingly enable infringement (e.g. by rolling out a gaming service that lists and can automatically install games where they know, or could easily have checked, that the terms do not allow you to install on such a service), then they probably run a higher risk than if they don't knowingly enable it (e.g. by letting you rent cloud machines with GPUs, completely blind to what you're running on them), but in both cases they run a risk.
I'm sure there's a lot of law, and case law, that sets boundaries for this, but I could easily imagine cloud gaming falling on the wrong side of the boundaries.
colinmarc 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that was my original point.
forrestthewoods 1 hours ago [-]
> there hasn't been much of an issue around it. I think most developers have come around to the idea that it increases game sales.
Cloud gaming is too small to be relevant in any way. That’s why it’s ignored.
VierScar 9 hours ago [-]
Why would companies withdraw licensing agreements? They get money from Nvidia and also from the consumer that has to buy the game separately.
They certainly aren't launching it on a different game-streaming service or intending to compete with it. Withdrawing doesn't make customers buy more of their games either - probably less.
So why would they be withdrawing from licensing agreements that are effectively free money for them?
colinmarc 3 hours ago [-]
Some independent developers have stated they don't like that the experience is degraded on GeForce now (because of latency, control bugs, etc). They prefer that users are running the game in a way that they've tested themselves.
limagnolia 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah because those indie developers test on such a wide variety of hardware...
Karliss 8 hours ago [-]
Game streaming services like that are harder to reliably hardware fingerprint and introduces unusual install patterns (same game potentially repeatedly installed large amount of times by same user).
For DRM and ban avoidance detection this means either false positives (which is bad rep) or if it's tuned to ignore those signals on specific service provider hardware makes it easier to do account sharing (and thus not buying the game).
sandworm101 6 hours ago [-]
I always assumed that the streaming services had negotiated to receive DRM-free versions specifically to avoid this issue, similar to the DRM/telemetry-free versions of Windows used on air-gapped government networks.
4ggr0 8 hours ago [-]
if we've learned anything from movie and show streaming then yes, publishers will absolutely all start their own game streaming service if it ever takes off. nice that Microsoft is building a gaming monopoly, can't have multiple platforms if there's only one mega-publisher.
dns_snek 5 hours ago [-]
Studios that gets purchased by these mega-publishers have always experienced enshittification, so the fact that they might make their slop streaming-only doesn't really bother me.
We'll be fine as long as we have an open platform to play good games from studios that haven't sold out, and without interference of anti-competitive gatekeepers, but we need to defend our right to use these open platforms - definitely the PC, and if we could find a way to align, I think we could regain ground on android/ios as well.
4ggr0 5 hours ago [-]
> we need to defend our right to use these open platforms - definitely the PC
coming from someone who thought they'd refresh their PC in 2026 (planned this in 2024), i agree. getting priced out feels like the first step in the wrong direction.
TiredOfLife 5 hours ago [-]
Game companies don't want money, they want all the money.
sandworm101 6 hours ago [-]
>> Why would companies withdraw licensing agreements? They get money from Nvidia
Lawyer reasons: Because they have lost the rights themselves. They may have licensed things like artwork/music for sale during a fixed period and so ongoing subscriptions, continual resales, would require renewing those licenses. Just look at the recent re-release of Mike Tyson's Punch Out, which had to remove Mike Tyson.
Evil reasons: They want to publish a new version of a game, say SimCity 11. The target audience is largely people already playing SimCity 10. So they discontinue SimCity 10, turn it off, to "encourage" the customer base to forget SimCity 10 and "purchase" SimCity 11.
Petty rich guy personal reasons: Say you are George Lucas and you have published something embarrassingly awful, like a Star Wars Christmas Special. The die-hard fans love it, or at least want to see it. But you are embarrassed. So you discontinue any concept of streaming/rental/sales to hide your shame, regardless of profit motivations. Also, Han shot first!
llm_nerd 7 hours ago [-]
They weren't getting money from nvidia, and really why should they? nvidia provides very expensive hardware on which I can access my own steam library, etc.
The world of IP isn't just about selling someone something, it's about reselling the same person that thing many times over. So now I have my VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, digital streaming, 4K digital streaming, 4K digital streaming HD collectors edition, etc. variants.
And of course if there are multiple cloud gaming providers, they see it as an opportunity to extort each of them.
When GFN first came out it had all of the Civilization games -- and it worked great -- but then as other cloud gaming options appeared 2K pulled the whole catalog, presumably with hand out. When Civ VII came out they suddenly allowed it all again, not only to rekindle interest in the series and presumably because some people were only going to buy the game if they could play it on the platform.
9 hours ago [-]
charcircuit 10 hours ago [-]
It sounds exactly how netcafes operate where the public can lease a computer and play games for a few hours. I don't think it's weird they have to get special licenses just like netcafes do.
abanana 6 hours ago [-]
(Source: owned and ran a netcafe for 10 years)
Just a correction: Netcafes don't have to get special licences. I'm not aware of any such licences existing anymore. They just buy however many standard retail copies or online accounts they want. Sometimes a publisher will see the marketing value and will provide some copies/licences at no charge.
Going back 15-20 years or so, Valve used to run a "Cybercafe Program" that was a large monthly expense for cybercafes, but shut it down after a while because it wasn't worth the cost of administration. Now cybercafes buy Steam accounts same as any end user. Asking any publisher for a cybercafe or "commercial exploitation" licence always invoked the response "Um - no idea?" from any department you asked, coupled with "We're afraid to suggest anything" from the legal department and "just use standard copies I suppose?" from the marketing department.
whatevaa 9 hours ago [-]
Do you need to have purchased the game at those cafes? Cause you do at geforce now. Game publishers who withdrew from geforce now are just greedy.
jjpones 9 hours ago [-]
There are a few models.
- They have majority of popular games already installed but you need to log in to your own steam account and only have access to the games you already own.
- They provide an in-house account and offer games available in that account to be played. This is usually for cafes offering playtime for console games.
- Partnerships with games studios/publishers, but really I only know about this in Korean PC Bangs for specific games where some content is locked. For example in League of Legends, you unlock playable characters over the course of playing the game so a low level account might not have the full roster unlocked. If you log in your account to affiliated PC Bangs, you have all characters unlocked while playing there.
littlecranky67 10 hours ago [-]
Well it is bad user experience. While GeforceNow allos me to connect my steam and epic account, the list of games actually playable is not my collection there, but the subset of games nvidia has a licensing deal (a lot less). Also they are free to remove support for games - as happened when big players withdrew their licensing.
I've seen tech videos from LTT and alike where they build remote gaming rigs using windows Hyper-V with GPU passthrough to the guest - that is essetially what they should do, and let me rent a virtual machine with hardware support and low latency video compression. I don't see a reason you would need any licensing deals there.
dtech 9 hours ago [-]
That is very different, because the netcafe own those games. This would be like needing to rent the computer at the cafe, bringing your own purchased game, but then the netcafe also needs a license to allow you to play your own games at the computer.
swiftcoder 1 days ago [-]
Because the model is diverged from the existing model Microsoft established via Game Pass, which made game streaming part of the licensing, not an add-on to purchasing.
Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee to play it on your tablet.
Of course, free game streaming was never a viable business model, so this isn't unexpected, but people aren't going to love the change either way.
crazygringo 17 hours ago [-]
If you buy the expensive piece of hardware and the game, you can play it on your tablet for free. With Remote Play! You've always been able to do that. Nothing changes.
This is about not buying the expensive piece of hardware. Then obviously it makes sense to charge you for the expensive hardware you're now using in the cloud. Or if you bought the expensive piece of hardware, but for some reason are choosing to use an Xbox in the cloud instead.
Game streaming from the cloud has never been part of the licensing of purchasing a game. It's always been part of a monthly Game Pass subscription. And with games in Game Pass, you don't even have to buy the game in the first place.
I get that some people may not love the change, but it's just more accurately reflecting costs, and there's absolutely no bait-and-switch here. Nothing has changed about what comes with a game you purchased. Nothing at all.
athrowaway3z 11 hours ago [-]
There is no bait-and-switch, but this is going to change things.
The industry is scared of recompiling and how AI has driven costs for people to host their own servers. That includes games like GTA where a lot of recurring revenue is from people spending money in online mode.
Microsoft would "solve" that issue, as well as normalize more players to spend monthly instead of once.
“Nothing changes” for your DVD/CDs when Netflix and Spotify arrived.
I personally have my doubts this is going to work, but the thing this model does open up is mainstream games having LLM driven NPCs.
gcr 6 hours ago [-]
If we lived in this world, wouldn’t we expect more games to have a lower initial price / F2P but higher hourly streaming cost?
asdff 20 hours ago [-]
>but people aren't going to love the change either way.
Perfect quote to summarize the direction of modern gaming. People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave. Remember when Oblivion horse armor was over the line? Literally everything has gotten worse from that point despite no one being happy about it.
somenameforme 13 hours ago [-]
It seems businesses also believe this, even when it's plainly not true.
---
PS1 = 102 million units sold
PS2 = 160
PS3 = 87 million
PS4 = 117 million
PS5 = 95 million (June 2026)
---
These numbers would be bad alone, but two things make them especially awful. The first is that there's no meaningful competition anymore. XBox has completely dropped the ball whereas the PS2 initially had the original XBox (which wasn't great, but had novelty going for it), Dreamcast, GameCube, and others all viably competing in the same approximate domain.
The second is that when the PS2 launched in 2000 the US population was 281 million. Now it's 349 million. I'm using US as a proxy for rest of the world, instead of the global population, since we're mostly interested in the developed world as that's the market for game consoles. So the break-even point in terms of marketshare relative to the PS2 would be 349/281*160 = 199 million units sold, and that's if we assume significant competition.
So not only are people leaving consoles, they're leaving in droves. And that leaves the companies squeezing their shrinking player bases even harder, which will make people leave even more quickly. They've lost around 50% of their adjust playerbase over the past 20 years, and at this rate I doubt game consoles will even exist in 20 more years.
bondant 7 hours ago [-]
It could be more interesting to look at all the consoles, not only the playstations.
N64/PS1/Saturn: 146 million units sold worldwide
GC/PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox: 214
Wii/PS3/Xbox 360: 275
WiiU/Switch/PS4/Xbox One: 338
Switch 2/PS5/Xbox Series: 150
So since only the last generation has lower number of units sold, it seems to me that the market for console is either only recently declining, or the cycle is much longer and people takes more time to buy the new generation.
somenameforme 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah I was also thinking about going this direction, because shrinking marketshare in a much larger market would paint a different picture. The reason I don't think this is as informative is because of what I alluded to with 'the same approximate domain.' The Wii took a radically different path than Sony/Microsoft. It had terrible graphics, terrible performance, weird controls, and was much more gamer friendly - full backwards compatibility (at first...), no monthly fee to use your own internet connection, and so on.
I'd also observe, vice versa, that after Nintendo jumped on the bandwagon of charging players to use their own internet connection that their sales started declining significantly. I don't know if it's causal; even people who chose to opt out themselves might not even really know. What I mean is that this feeling of getting nickeled and dimed is going to imperil fun in some impossible to quantify fashion, and if these various actions hit another completely unquantifiable breaking point, then you start losing players in yet another unquantifiable way - until suddenly you notice that people just don't seem to want what you're offering anymore.
--
EDIT: And I had a chuckle seeing a topic just posted: "Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier" [1]
I'd be interested to know how complex the modelling behind this is for the companies involved, what reasons they think are behind changes and what levers are within their reach to pull (and what's outside their control).
One aspect that springs to mind immediately looking at that timeline is the rise of mobile, it wouldn't have happened immediately at launch (around 2007) but has been a building wave that meant practically everyone has a games device in their pocket. For audiences of certain genres is all they need where they might have contributed to the overall picture of dedicated gaming devices, leaving other gamers and companies to balance the books for other genres that are left.
somenameforme 3 hours ago [-]
I think the most practical issue is that we're not talking about companies per se, but individuals. And the time horizon of any given individual tends to be much less than the time horizon of a company. So imagine you're an executive at XBox, and find yourself in charge of their games division. Your performance is going to be measured based on your results over the next quarters where the next few years would be 'long term.' And so your actions are going to be geared towards maximizing returns over that window.
'Shareholder value' is another problem. Shareholders, in general, do not hold shares of companies because they want those companies to succeed, but because they expect returns from those companies. If they can get a 50% return and then have the company die in a fiery blaze, most shareholders would be perfectly fine with that so long as they were reasonably confident that they wouldn't, themselves, get burnt. So you have shareholders with no interest in the long-term similarly aligned with executives who have no interest in the long-run.
There's also probably more technical issues like discounting earnings over time. A penny earned today is generally considered significantly more valuable than a penny earned tomorrow by companies due to inflation, opportunity cost, and other such issues. So even if you think the long-term is relevant, the expected earnings cost would have to be dramatic to make it comparable to the impact of next quarter.
Narishma 12 hours ago [-]
You missed the biggest reason the newer consoles couldn't reach PS2 numbers: Sony managed to bring its price all the way down to $99. PS3 and PS4 only went down to $299. PS5 instead has had multiple price increases and is now way more expensive than it was at launch.
somenameforme 12 hours ago [-]
While this is true and has special reasons this gen, the PS4 was 'normal' except there was another difference there as well. Prior to the PS4, companies subsidized hardware to an extreme degree. For instance in the original XBox the video card in that system was worth significantly more than the entire console's MSRP.
But from the PS4 onward, the consoles were made of a relatively lightly modified retail hardware that was sold for profit as quickly as possible. Both the PS4 and PS5 were being sold for profit (on the hardware), less than a year after launch. I think this was due to again companies squeezing a shrinking playerbase even harder, to try to maintain profit levels.
I think the obsession on next quarter, while pretending that there's no such thing as long-term consequences, is eating companies alive. Because there are absolutely long-term consequences.
cisc 8 hours ago [-]
PlayStation sells better in Europe than it does in North America. XBox sells better in North America than it does in Europe, but has never sold as well globally as the PlayStation of its generation:
Basically everything Microsoft (deservedly) got shit for with the Xbox One, and which their reputation never recovered from, is bog-standard practice on consoles and plenty of games now.
asdff 20 hours ago [-]
I can't even remember what MS did or didn't do in that keynote. Are they really hurting in this gen? I think their success vs PS is all about (lack of) good platform exclusives along with how online gaming got more siloed and less communal. Halo 3 won them the north american market and it wouldn't have been the same without all chat and everyone still having a working mic at that point in the 360s life.
hbn 60 minutes ago [-]
The 360 was winning hard early in the 7th console generation, between the success of Xbox Live/popularity of Halo 3 and Sony's $500 starting price for the PS3 that made the Xbox's $300 starting price look great.
But later on in the generation, Sony made big price cuts and went hard putting out very good exclusive games that people bought systems for. By the end, they beat out Microsoft in sales.
Then the lead-up to the Xbox One launch was such a PR disaster which the another comment covered. The PS4 continued getting great exclusive games while Microsoft's big IPs like Halo and Gears of War more or less fell out of relevancy if not had their brand destroyed by new entries that didn't impress fans. They spent way too much time and effort trying to make the Kinect the future of Xbox in hopes of replicating Nintendo's success with the Wii, years after the novelty of motion controls stopped impressing anyone.
The unfortunate thing is they dropped the ball so hard that Sony basically stopped trying in the latest generation. Sony is pissing people off left and right but they're still winning because they have no direct competition (Nintendo has been off doing their own thing since the Wii)
chocochunks 17 hours ago [-]
Xbox One was originally going to require frequent online check ins, I think daily or weekly, games on disc were going to tie themselves to your account and publishers could choose whether or not you could resell them at select retailers or share them with your friends, IIRC you could share a game one time with a friend. They also didn't focus on games when showing it off and it was priced $100 higher than PS4 despite being weaker because of the bundled Kinect nobody wanted.
They are not doing super amazing this gen. Reports have them selling 1/3rd the units of PlayStation 5, Game Pass has stalled, they apparently used a JIT manufacturing setup and so were much more affected by the component shortage, so a console that was $500 at launch is now $800.
Funnily enough, because they put in serials into Xbox One games for tracking they did recently launch a really cool disc to digital service that gives the best benefits of physical and digital.
jbm 19 hours ago [-]
The announced a few things.
1. Concentrating on Cable (LOL in retrospect, but controlling the living room was always the plan so I get it)
2. Getting rid of physical games
overfeed 20 hours ago [-]
> People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave.
People usually dont - until the levies break, and they do. The PlayStation 4 won its generation, because people left XBox for it, in part, over game sharing (or lack thereof)
asdff 19 hours ago [-]
It feels like PS4 winning was more a result of the halo 3 world of all chat staying in lobbies xbox live dying than anything else. PS3 outsold xbox outside North america too so its really only a regional phenomenon. Hard to really articulate what a social phenomenon halo 3 was in its time. We all just assumed every new game would be like this going forward, but there was never a game like it since. Communities too fractured into different nonexclusive IPs. Death of allchat and staying in lobbies and no one bothering with the mic anymore. No more interest in offering stuff like custom game tools or mapmakers like forge. No fileshare like what bungie.net had for clips and maps.
So shocking in hindsight how ms never realized this formula as it was happening and let it wither on the vine.
firesteelrain 8 hours ago [-]
Call of duty black ops at least recently has all chat at the end of the game. I think that’s the game trying to remember. Been maybe a year since I played latest CoD on XBox
pipes 19 hours ago [-]
People are happy enough to spend their money on it though. (Personally I'm amazed people pay money for some different coloured pixels in a game, but in general I don't really like modern games. I aged out somewhere around the PS2 era and now mostly buy from gog.com or play emulators: I'm not the target market!).
asdff 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah I don't understand the skins/cosmetics stuff at all, just seems lost on me and gamers of my generation. Always shocking to me when I see gamers online complain about say the lack of compelling cosmetic offerings in the in game store, as if that's a big selling point of the game for them. I always use default skins. Earned skins are another story, I'll use those because they mean something. Purchased skins though is almost like stolen valor.
buran77 18 hours ago [-]
Microsoft remembers that just a few short decades ago you'd pay a coin that was usually worth more than today's quarter to play at the arcade and got far less than an hour for it. You owned nothing and were happy for it.
A lot of big tech companies want to bring back those time because they believe the few decades in between where people owned and controlled their devices and software in a very open computing ecosystem were a mistake. So the aim now is to give you a device you pay for and use but never fully control, and software or media that you rent but never own.
missinglugnut 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
paxy 1 days ago [-]
Streaming games from your own Xbox is free. This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".
swiftcoder 1 days ago [-]
> This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".
Right, but those people also don't own Xbox games. So this goes from "add-on fee to play the games your already own conveniently", to "buy a $60 game and then pay $/hour to actually play it"
Are you saving money in the second scenario vs buying a console? Almost certainly. But it doesn't feel that way to the person paying a big whack upfront and then also stacks of game time.
paxy 1 days ago [-]
There's no need to overcomplicate it with "feelings", the math is fairly straightforward. The cost of games is the same in either case. Beyond that you either pay $800-$1000 for a console/$2000+ for a gaming PC, OR $10-20/mo for cloud gaming. Depending on your needs #2 might be the better option, which is why services like GeForce Now are so popular.
swiftcoder 21 hours ago [-]
> There's no need to overcomplicate it with "feelings", the math is fairly straightforward
It turns out that the customer's perception of a product is pretty vital to its performance in the marketplace. The math can math just fine, but if the customer doesn't feel good about it, you don't make the sale.
Subscriptions try to soften the blow of a big purchase by lowering the monthly payments under your "casual expenditures" threshold. Upfront payments reward you with an immediate sense of ownership, and no recurring anxiety about affording the item.
Combining the two in this particular order is sort of the worst of both worlds - there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...
Aurornis 12 hours ago [-]
> there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...
Balloon payment loans are very rare in the United States. I don't know where you live but I don't think you realize how unusual balloon payment loans are.
swiftcoder 11 hours ago [-]
They are the default in much of Europe, though the expectation is that you'll likely trade the car in when the balloon comes due.
dahcryn 9 hours ago [-]
not in my part of europe?
swiftcoder 6 hours ago [-]
Here in Spain it is pretty much all car loans. Also popular in the UK and Ireland (Personal Contract Purchase), Germany (Ballonfinanzierung), France (Crédit Cool), and so on
metaphor 16 hours ago [-]
> there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...
What (where?) in the world are you even talking about?
torben-friis 18 hours ago [-]
Not present in the math is that the cloud gaming service is able (and likely) to raise prices substantially, worsen the service or simply disappear.
One of the silver linings of a subscription model is that you're able to stop paying and move when it's no longer interesting, here you're asked to invest in a platform that can be taken from you.
paxy 17 hours ago [-]
What are you investing in exactly? You can pay $10/mo while the service is good, and then stop. The games you buy are still yours.
swiftcoder 11 hours ago [-]
> The games you buy are still yours
Are they really? You will "own" digital licenses to the games, but you will not have any way to play them once you stop paying for the subscription.
That doesn't feel like "ownership" to me...
johnisgood 10 hours ago [-]
They can be taken away from you at any point by locking your account for whatever.
You often cannot run even single player games without having connected to Steam (no need for account to be locked for this, but requires connectivity for one).
Multiplayer games almost always require Steam these days.
I used Steam as an example but applies to other platforms as well.
So yeah, I would say you pay for the license only, and you do not own the games at all, not anymore, and this has been true for a long time now.
torben-friis 9 hours ago [-]
>The games you buy are still yours.
They're not yours. Can you resell and recoup? Nope, digital licenses.
Can you buy a 2k computer and play them? You can't or won't, that's the whole reason you're using this system instead.
So you effectively have 60 bucks per game as a moat to hold you in while they boil the water.
codebje 17 hours ago [-]
I tried #2 from here in Australia, but the experience was incredibly poor despite fibre to the home at 500mb/s. You'd be better off buying one of the gaming mini-PCs with 32GB DDR5 and a 760/780M iGPU for ~3-4yrs worth of monthly costs, but the Vimes theory of economics might prevent that.
(I wound up building a gaming PC, much more capable but much more than the cost of streaming over an equivalent lifetime - IF streaming services don't enshittify to cost more and deliver less over time, which we all know they will.)
Capricorn2481 24 minutes ago [-]
You originally said this
> Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee
That's why people were confused. You made it sound like you couldn't use your hardware to play games. Why are you streaming from cloud PCs in the first place if you have the hardware?
anankaie 19 hours ago [-]
That is not quite accurate -- the Game Pass library was a subset of what could be streamed -- things that were not available in Game Pass could still be streamed provided you owned them. When games went out of Game Pass you could purchase them and continue streaming.
19 hours ago [-]
crazygringo 17 hours ago [-]
Seriously! They're not charging you for the "streaming" or for the "game you already bought" -- they're charging you for renting the Xbox in the cloud that is running the game, the GPU.
I get that it was free before as part of a subscription, but now GPU's are more expensive. Nothing that you paid for up-front is being taken away. The subscription plans just changed is all.
phyzix5761 1 days ago [-]
> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part?
Because they're trying to push a specific narrative.
InsidiousWombat 20 hours ago [-]
> There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.
well, unless you want to play some peer to peer multiplayer, then there is a sub you need to pay
paxy 17 hours ago [-]
That isn't specific to cloud gaming.
DanielHB 7 hours ago [-]
Because the plan is obviously to eventually remove the ability to play on your own hardware, or to buy (license) the game at all. They want you to only be able to enjoy it by paying by the hour.
It is a step towards normalization of anti-consumer habits.
senordevnyc 6 hours ago [-]
That's not obvious at all. I hear that you personally have some fear about that though.
squidlib 19 hours ago [-]
10-20 hours a week is a lot of gaming. Was it suggested that was a small amount and not worth the investment to have an actual machine? 10-20hrs over a month is more in the realm of streaming imo.
paxy 17 hours ago [-]
Quick math -
Xbox Cloud Gaming gives you 50 hours for $12. You could game for 3333 hours to equal the Xbox Series X in price ($800). Say you want to depreciate the device over 7 years, that's about 500 hours of gaming a year, or ~9-10 hours a week.
I'd say that's a pretty reasonable limit for a low volume, casual gamer.
mrheosuper 13 hours ago [-]
That heavily assumes MS does not increase the price, which has been proven to be false when they increase Gamepass price in the past.
testing22321 18 hours ago [-]
The average American watches 4 hours of TV per day!!!
Half of all Americans watch more…..
ChrisRR 8 hours ago [-]
TV can be passively watched though while you do other things. Gaming has to be actively engaged with
wasmitnetzen 10 hours ago [-]
"Average" probably means the mean here, not the median. So it's not half who watch more than that. There's probably a big gap between the mean and the median. Nobody publishes the median because that number is published by the ad industry which has no interest in showing the lower median.
OJFord 15 hours ago [-]
Is that statistic active watching, or skewed by those that leave it on 24h news or shopping or whatever 24/7?
17 hours ago [-]
anigbrowl 13 hours ago [-]
I strongly suspect that 'gamers rise up' style campaigns are promoted by the same people who promote the WEF as a boogeyman.
throwaway85825 12 hours ago [-]
If they had charged people the economic price up front instead of intentionally bait and switching this wouldn't be controversial.
numlock86 8 hours ago [-]
> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part?
To imply it being somewhat controversial, so people jump in and generate clicks.
rimliu 10 hours ago [-]
Cannot wait for "they want you to pay for the gas to drive a car you already bought!"
SCdF 7 hours ago [-]
In the UK at least you are looking at electricity costs that are not that far away from those prices frankly.
It is not unexpected to pay 30p/kWh, which if you have a 500W graphics card is 15p/hr to play a AAA videogame, in graphics card cost alone. This ignores you will also be thrashing your CPU, which is maybe another 125W.
This is still a premium over that, but you don't need to buy the graphics card in the first place, so it's pretty understandable.
automatic6131 6 hours ago [-]
There is only one 500W GPU and those owners are cost insensitive so we can ignore them.
A more realistic number is 400-500W total power for the whole PC including the monitor. If a typical UK gamer spends 3 hours gaming every single day (or averages that, so 20 hours a week), they will add... £150 to their energy bills.
Lets compare that with two loads of laundry & tumble drying per week on eco mode (2 * 3.5kwh * £0.30 * 52) which is £110
or using a dishwasher twice a week: £40
It is not very much. And it's not subject to random licensing bait&switch, data center input lag, doesn't require the expensive monthly internet charges for the faster fiber tiers because you're streaming video data constantly, and you also have a PC to do with as you wish.
People are right to have an instinctive, emotional revulsion to game streaming. You can run the numbers and find a rational revulsion also.
SCdF 6 hours ago [-]
If your dishwasher costs 20 quid for a single run you have hired an actual human to wash your dishes. Same with your laundry example, those numbers are insane.
They are also irrelevant? I'm not really sure what point you're making?
I think game streaming is fine. You're still buy the games, you can still play them locally. I really don't see the issue. The Stadia model was bad, sure, but "rent out a gfx card over the network" is not something I think is worth ruffling your feathers over.
dolkycape 6 hours ago [-]
If you rent in the cloud for 24 us cent per hour it works out to £195 in year with 3hr/day gaming. An Xbox Series X costs like £650 so the extra £45 you pay for streaming from a data center means your purchased Xbox will take ~15 years to pay for itself.
ChrisRR 8 hours ago [-]
Because they want to find a reason for you to be angry. Anger gets clicks
jeppester 19 hours ago [-]
In the case of Xbox, you'd get something comparable to Xbox Series X (or S in some situations). So it's hardly comparable to a multi-thousand dollar rig.
4thguy 1 days ago [-]
> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part? There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.
Correct, that is why the "to stream games you bought" qualifier exists in the title :)
menshiki 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it sounds like a reasonable deal to me.
roosterIllusi0n 16 hours ago [-]
Rentals are not solid deals. They are designed to hamper ownership and force you to rent forever. At least be honest and say you think monopolies should be able to make hardware artificially unaffordable so people are forced to pay subscription fees instead.
pdntspa 11 hours ago [-]
And then one generation from now there are no more hardware consoles and you are stuck streaming games from the cloud from your thin-client smart TV. Yet another joy of actually having a physical thing taken away from us, yet again.
sick_of_slop 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
> There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.
They want to eliminate that. AIs will open source their games otherwise.
jasomill 1 days ago [-]
Not going to be viable for entire genres of games because latency.
AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.
But pirates have historically done a pretty good job without AI.
Existing trends towards games with required online components, subscription-based content and microtransactions will no doubt continue, of course.
Not streaming, other than as an extra-cost option, because the margins on subscriptions and microtransactions are bound to be orders of magnitude higher while providing more value to the majority of players.
beenBoutIT 12 hours ago [-]
The reality is that proprietary HW from past console generations can be significantly improved and made less expensive via modern tech advancements to provide a superior gaming experience without load times or latency.
A $200 modernized PS2 or $100 modernized SNES will dominate gaming long before streaming does.
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
> AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.
AIs should be able to use the same clean room reverse engineering techniques humans use in order to produce a legally clean open source game engine that can use the original game's copyrighted assets.
shakna 20 hours ago [-]
... A clean room, means that you aren't reverse engineering. You're producing the same result, with zero awareness of the process, or it isn't a clean room.
LLMs are created through mass ingestion of data, and so, by definition, cannot be a clean room. They are trained on the things that they're tasked with copying.
matheusmoreira 19 hours ago [-]
How could the possibly have been trained on the proprietary source code of games made many years ago?
shakna 12 hours ago [-]
How could they have trained on books that they didn't buy or source from libraries?
I'm afraid, the companies in question, have been more than happy to ingest pirated material.
matheusmoreira 5 hours ago [-]
Game copies don't usually include their source code.
solyin 19 hours ago [-]
How is Claude going to be trained on GTA5'S game engine source code if it's closed source?
jerf 18 hours ago [-]
It isn't that it will have been trained on the source code. The "decompilation" craze has it in the name... it is being done by decompiling the game and then modifying it. I don't think it's even a question as to whether or not the game companies are going to come down hard on this and I would not recommend to anyone that they jump up and volunteer to be the legal test case for that.
A clean-room implementation is going to be much, much more effort than a "decompilation". Even a decompilation is, I think, more than the hype is claiming. You can't just point at a game, say "decompile it and make it work on Windows" and get a result in one shot. It will take playtesting, cycling around, QA, and time to polish it up. But that will still itself be much easier than an actual clean room implementation. Let alone getting sued by the owner anyhow and having to prove it was clean room in a typical chaotic individual dev environment.
russelg 15 hours ago [-]
Well funny enough, the code for GTA5 did leak not too long ago...
zdp7 18 hours ago [-]
It's not though. We get the machine code for programs we run on our PCs. All the logic is provided to the end user. The only protection these days, is not doing all the game logic on the end users PC.
officeplant 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tancop 23 hours ago [-]
You make agent A decompile the code and describe the behavior of each function in a spec. Then agent B with no access to the internet or the original code implements it.
This is legally safe because the spec only described interfaces and had no copyrighted code from the original app. APIs are fair use under Google v Oracle and code that accidentally ends up the same falls under merger doctrine.
They can maybe try and get you on patents but that's easy to avoid by doing it in Europe. Trade secrets don't apply because you reverse engineered the code. The only thing left is good old section 1201.
Of course it's different in practice because these companies have huge legal teams and know where the corpo friendly or tech illiterate judges work. But that's a separate question from is it legal or not.
shakna 12 hours ago [-]
You have an automated pipeline, that includes decompilation. I highly doubt the courts will see the nuance that you apparently do.
The pipeline begins with decompilation. Maybe it doesn't save all that information, but it is part of the pipeline, and so, will be part of the consideration when discovery happens.
officeplant 28 minutes ago [-]
I'll take "Shit people on the orange site say" for $400 Alex.
ahartmetz 1 days ago [-]
"""Open sourcing""" (this needs maximum scare quotes) games by AI-washing the decompilation is legally just about the same as cracking. You won't be able to deploy the result on a walled garden console and most likely not for for money anywhere, and FOSS people won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
Illegality isn't going to stop anything. It's going to happen regardless.
Fixing this requires the end of free personal computing as we know it today. Every computer must become a walled garden. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for must be destroyed.
jasomill 1 days ago [-]
Sure, but illegality means it's not going to happen commercially.
And the game industry has continued to grow in spite of rampant piracy for decades, so there's not much to change here other than a slight reduction in the value of console exclusives if they can be easily vibe ported to PC (but the majority of players will play them on console anyway, as is the case with current console platforms that are easily emulated like Switch).
sleepybrett 20 hours ago [-]
.. yeah because that has put a stop to all the iptv providers.
ahartmetz 1 days ago [-]
It is going to happen, but mostly for older games to keep them playable and maybe to get console exclusives to PC. It doesn't make sense to compete with the copied games because it's illegal. It doesn't make sense to "crack" the games like that because one can just crack the original games the usual way (probably with AI support, but that doesn't matter).
jrootabega 18 hours ago [-]
They will just eliminate "your own hardware".
dawnerd 14 hours ago [-]
Or if you do own the hardware it'll be a simple thin client.
paxy 1 days ago [-]
Because games couldn't be pirated before AI?
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
Copyright infringement has always been trivial, but the same couldn't be said about reverse engineering. AIs changed that. The market fot remakes and ports is now threatened. Instead of just waiting ages for some company to port their games to PC, people can just do it themselves.
jasomill 1 days ago [-]
AI or otherwise, porting and QAing a title is orders of magnitude more difficult than downloading a cracked copy of an existing port.
So at most, vibe ports will marginally lower the value of platform exclusives, and lead to fewer exclusives and/or shorter exclusivity periods.
I, for one, have no problem with this outcome.
malwrar 1 days ago [-]
Predicting it now that people will vibecode open source clones built from having bots play the closed game for training data.
beefsack 15 hours ago [-]
The unfortunate reality is that all of the fun recompilation projects are helping seal the fate of us not being able to run games, or software in general, on our own hardware. The risk is very quickly becoming too great for proprietary software publishers in letting compiled artifacts land in customers' hands.
I feel GTA 6 will be the last mainline GTA that we run on our local systems.
pradn 1 hours ago [-]
Games can now be recompiled to other platforms, like consoles and the browser, via WASM. So Zelda BotW can be played on a jailbroken PS5, and in the browser.
What actually limits someone from doing this?
1) You need the hardware to play the games, still. You still need a good enough PC or a console like a PS5 to play all these emulated/cross-compiled games. Though, the cost is moderate these days: a used PS5 goes for $400-500?
2) You need to want to jailbreak your console, giving up "mainstream" features (multiplayer, warranty). This requires some interest and know-how, too. Though the jailbreak steps are easy these days.
3) If you lack a console, your PC needs to be strong enough to play WASM or emulated/cross-compiled games. I suppose for consoles like the Switch, that aren't super powerful, most PCs made the past few years could play a AAA Zelda game in the browser. But playing on PC is often not as fun as on a console, with the couch and controller and all.
I have a hard time people en masse want to give up multiplayer, by jailbreaking their consoles.
But single-player games are probably going to have a harder time.
The video game world is already super top heavy, with mass-market multi-player games (like Valorant), not to mention casino-like gacha games. So the trends may further favor this current track.
jonhohle 14 hours ago [-]
That’s actually a really interesting take I hadn’t thought of. I’m involved in a decomp project (that to my knowledge is all human created) and knew there would be a legal reconning for AI powered projects, but I didn’t anticipate the business model changing to prevent near future releases from being preserved through fair use RE. What a bleak outlook.
linuxftw 55 minutes ago [-]
Like Arcades? Well, that would just open the door to game providers that do provide such software/hardware.
CMay 13 hours ago [-]
This is not necessarily the case, as you still need to deliver an experience that customers enjoy and will pay money for. This means consoles that let them play games in their hands with the highest picture quality and lowest latency. No disruptions from poor wireless or significant interference in environments like apartment complexes.
Fully homomorphic encrypted processing may also become a norm and if that is combined with some games going back to being console only, there could be significant enough protection for games that contain trade secrets. That said, the days may be numbered for trade secrets at all given that better models may make today's clever trade secrets look juvenile.
At the same time, a lot of these games were already getting decompiled and inspected at runtime. That has historically been one part of the incentive to release games on console only or console first, particularly first party titles.
In any market where it's relevant to their business interests, they can still rely on the copyright laws and can set traps for any companies using decompiled code as part of their own paid and sold product. That whole process will become cheaper and easier to do as well, plus new approaches to slowing down or hindering the results of decompilation will become normal for games in mathematically provable ways. We've already seen approaches over the years like Denuvo.
Always online games themselves have benefited from some of their code being in the cloud and that will obviously be under fire more than ever with people writing their own servers, but even that might have novel approaches that can survive advanced tampering.
wongarsu 3 hours ago [-]
Indie platformers will continue to run entirely on the console. But AAA games have a history of prioritizing visuals over everything else, because that sells trailers. Fully streamed games executing on a remote GPU allow better graphics and prevent decompilation and piracy, all great things from the publisher's POV. So far the economics haven't been appealing and the experience isn't uniform for customers, but I could see AI-assisted decompilation pushing the AAA publishers over the threshold
trvz 8 hours ago [-]
It would coincide with too many people not being able to buy gaming hardware though.
But also AI can just recreate games from gameplay videos.
Gareth321 8 hours ago [-]
I'm not worried at all. LLMs are already so good that they can reproduce many apps and games merely by using those apps and games for a little while. By the time customers are willing to accept streaming only games (which I contend is still MANY years away from mainstream), LLMs will be able to near perfectly replicate these games. Or better yet, make far better versions of them. I'm not even sure we have a games industry in a few years.
netdevphoenix 8 hours ago [-]
Remember, Uber used to be dirty cheap too in the beginning. Netflix used to be dirty cheap in the beginning. All main subscriptions follow the same lifecycle. Don't expect it to be cheap forever.
Or for long.
not-kinsale-joe 5 hours ago [-]
Same with my beloved cheap AI subscriptions.
snarfy 2 hours ago [-]
It's nice being able to rent 300k of hardware for $20/mo coding subscription. I look at these little strix halo things and think nope I'm good.
spider-mario 7 hours ago [-]
There might be a debate to be had about whether the pricing is right, but the title gives the impression of implying that buying a licence to a game entitles you to a server that runs it. It doesn’t. “Xbox offers a paid service to run your games if you don’t have the hardware to do it yourself” is not a worse situation than if that service didn’t exist at all.
spider-mario 5 hours ago [-]
Or for an analogy: “IKEA wants you to pay $50 to assemble furniture you bought”
Well… yeah. Or you can assemble it yourself for free if you prefer.
Terretta 1 days ago [-]
While visiting not(USA) recently, found Xbox Cloud streaming no longer viable (lag fest) though last year travels (even over 5g hotspot) it was fine. Doesn't bode well for this streaming concept.
Looked for a real console and discovered all small shops and big box chains offer Nintendo and PS, none have Xbox. Speaking with managers revealed they or their suppliers "lost" or "ended" contracts to carry it.
Secondary market / used was dirt cheap – good condition consoles for less than a new controller: €35 for Xbox One S, €85 for Xbox Series S.
Smelled like a death spiral well underway.
td521534f12 15 hours ago [-]
The Xbox console is a pretty bad deal outside of the US because a lot of the software features (streaming apps etc.) don't work outside the US. Everyone buys PlayStation instead. Nintendo is of course doing their own separate thing focused on exclusive games.
KeplerBoy 7 hours ago [-]
Does anyone care about the software features? Every phone and TV has those already.
td521534f12 2 hours ago [-]
The ones built into the TVs suck because they don't get updated and are usually really slow and choppy to use. Everyone I know who doesn't use an HTPC, uses an Xbox or PlayStation to watch stuff.
ChrisRR 1 days ago [-]
Sounds fair. If you essentially already have a TV or other device as a thin client, I can see many people happily paying $12 for 50 hours compared to spending $1000 on the entire console
password54321 1 days ago [-]
Yeah like the Google Stadia. I think there was news of someone who spent >100s of hours on Red Dead Redemption 2 only to have all his save data wiped when Stadia shut down.
The stupid thing with Stadia is that every game you bought came with UNLIMITED FREE 1080p streaming.
password54321 1 days ago [-]
They certainly made a loss on this guy but it is far from "stupid" from a consumer perspective.
genxy 17 hours ago [-]
Youtube comes with "free 1080p" infinite streaming and it makes double digit billions a year.
chii 16 hours ago [-]
You can't be interrupted with ads every few minutes when gaming.
KeplerBoy 7 hours ago [-]
You absolutely could though. They could just pause the game in a solo game or detect you are in between matches in a multiplayer game.
chii 5 hours ago [-]
i dont mean technically, i meant players won't accept it.
0cf8612b2e1e 15 hours ago [-]
File serving is cheap vs rendering a game. A single core can serve many video streams but may be insufficient to run even one game.
pllbnk 1 days ago [-]
It will be $1/hour in a year. Then you will have to pay a different rate for better graphics. These things don't end well. Once they see that they have a stable customer base, they will figure out how to squeeze even more money from their customers. Of course, it will be advertised as something that the customers themselves required and they do it for them, not for themselves.
Good4boothee 6 hours ago [-]
> Then you will have to pay a different rate for better graphics.
That is already a thing in NVidia Now, why would Xbox do it differently?
autuni 10 hours ago [-]
can't wait for the ad-fueled cheap tiers right when some games publish as streaming only
geocar 1 days ago [-]
Once upon a time we spent quarters in the arcade faster than that.
brycewray 1 days ago [-]
If we did it in 1980 (I was doing it earlier than that), those each would be a dollar now.[0]
Then again, once the tolling infrastructure is in place and normalized, it’s all too easy to boil the frog…
1 days ago [-]
dfedbeef 1 days ago [-]
Not for the Xbox though :/
Forgeties79 1 days ago [-]
I’m glad I got my series S for $300 when I did
tonymet 7 minutes ago [-]
Game Pass Ultimate is still the best deal for renting & streaming content. 15 hours is perfect for those who want to game away from home.
I got into Xbox and Game Pass a few years ago to catch up on titles like Halo , Gears, Forza Horizon etc that I never had a chance to play. I still can’t believe that I can play thousands of games going back 20+ years.
it’s Willy Wonka’s Game Factory and people are still moaning!
trey-jones 1 days ago [-]
I have a server running in my basement with 2 nvidia Tesla GPUs that I bought for ~$70 each on ebay. (Unfortunately the RAM cost an arm and a leg). I built it for inference, but I also set it up to run sunshine server and now I have my Steam library on the TV through a Raspberry Pi 3. Even better, it was a fun and interesting project, maybe not as straightforward as you think. Unfortunately it's entirely possible that it costs .24/hr just for the electricity.
Now, this feels fine with <10ms input latency over wifi. Even in 2026 I'm skeptical about sending my input to Atlanta and back.
swiftcoder 1 days ago [-]
> Unfortunately it's entirely possible that it costs .24/hr just for the electricity
Of course you don't need 2x teslas just to stream a game to your living room - a relatively power-efficient streaming box is possible
wildzzz 1 days ago [-]
The raspberry pi is the actual device hooked up to the TV I think, the GPUs are elsewhere in the house.
TiredOfLife 1 days ago [-]
The game runs on that pc in basement
swiftcoder 1 days ago [-]
Yes, I understand that. My point is that 2x Teslas are overkill for gaming - his power bill is so high because he's using an expensive ML inference box to stream games.
ajcp 15 hours ago [-]
Unless it’s a dumb TV you can just install the Steam app on your TV and avoid Sunshine and the Pi all together.
trey-jones 5 hours ago [-]
Well, yes, it is a dumb TV - that still seems normal to me. I don't like computers in most of my things. I like them where I can see them.
ajcp 60 minutes ago [-]
That's fair, and honestly is my preference as well.
On top of that, the Steam App is a bit janky, so much so that I just hauled my gaming rig out, plugged it directly into the TV, set Steam to launch at start-up in Big Picture Mode and bam, good to go.
Can't wait for the Steam Machine though...
esperent 14 hours ago [-]
Are you locked into steam then? Or can you use it to stream other games, e.g. stuff bought on GOG?
jeroenhd 11 hours ago [-]
Steam can stream any game, but non-Steam games do need to be set up on the computer to launch through Steam to work properly.
t-writescode 12 hours ago [-]
Except we literally just had stories about ... LG, was it? ... spying on everything - and the obvious way for that to happen is to plug your TV into the internet.
rmunn 10 hours ago [-]
Correct, it was LG — though I see no reason to assume that other smart-TV manufacturers aren't doing similar things. Perhaps not quite as egregiously as LG, where the TV's microphone was picking up conversations in the room even when the TV appeared to be off (but was actually in standby mode). But I would assume that if a smart TV from any brand is connected to the net, it's transmitting data home about what you watch, what ads you sat through vs fast-forwarded, and so on.
SOLAR_FIELDS 1 days ago [-]
2018
-wake up feeling sick after a late night of playing video games
-excited to play some halo 2k19
-"xbox on"
-...
-"XBOX ON"
-"Please verify that you are "annon332" by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
-"Doritos™ Dew™ it right"
-"ERROR! Please drink a verification can"
-reach into my Doritos™ Mountain Dew™ Halo 2k19™ War Chest
-only a few cans left, needed to verify 14 times last night
-still feeling sick from the 14
-force it down and grumble out "mmmm that really hit the spot"
-xbox does nothing
-i attempt to smile
-"Connecting to verification server"
-...
-"Verification complete!"
-finally
-boot up halo 2k19
-finding multiplayer match...
-"ERROR! User attempting to steal online gameplay!"
-my mother just walked in the room
-"Adding another user to your pass, this will be charged to your credit card. Do you accept?"
-"NO!"
-"Console entering lock state!"
Nueva Yo
-"to unlock drink verification can"
-last can
-"WARNING, OUT OF VERIFICATION CANS, an order has been shipped and charged to your credit card"
-drink half the can, oh god im going to be sick
-pour the last half out the window
-"PIRACY DETECTED! PLEASE COMPLETE THIS ADVERTISEMENT TO CONTINUE"
-the mountain dew ad plays
-i have to dance for it
-feeling so sick
-makes me sing along
-dancing and singing
-"mountain dew is for me and you"
-throw up on my self
-throw up on my tv and entertainment system
-router shorts
-"ERROR NO CONNECTION! XBOX SHUTTING OFF"
-"PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE"
motbus3 1 days ago [-]
Different from others, I don't think the price is fair. But also I don't know the cost structure well enough, I can have only an educated guess.
But what I am definitely afraid of is that they will want to charge games per hour anyway.
The talks that consoles will cost 2000 USD is part of it. They don't want you to own things anymore.
You can't buy a house anymore, because they rather buy and keep it to create shortages and make you pay an absurd rent.
We should be talking more about how taxes should fit into this world where they are positioning themselves to not allow people to have things, not even the basic.
For examples, in the housing thing, it should not only have higher taxes for keeping properties empty but also it should be exponential otherwise it will become a cost to people. Making it exponential make it unviable.
Also, investment funds should be much more regulated and should require approval for every transaction above a threshold (which imo should be small to close loopholes).
This will slow things down enough.
The demand will still exist but companies will fill the gap. We should not be relying on one single investment fund to control your health, housing and employment.
We also should be discussing on closing all the gaps that ultra rich are using to not contribute back to the system they explore.
They became leeches/parasites and not putting back the amount they should is causing them to be able to break the system more and more.
The only Pacific way right now is to boy;cott these big fellas.
They got to comfortable saying that we are trash and the blame of everything is on us while doing everything they can to not even pay basic rights to employees.
I also think that if you know a trillionaire employee with a white collar, they also should get bit more pressure.
I know someone working in a company which recently caused hundreds of "collateral" deaths, and for him and everyone in the company, it is not their fault they exploded innocent people. We need to put these folks back to reality, because they are the same type of trash as we are, and they don't know it.
Now I guess it is obvious why they have been building so many bunkers lately.
They were definitely conspiring.
(Btw, I have a strong feeling that sxai+t might become an investment fund with several companies, but that's another conversation)
ianm218 1 days ago [-]
Housing is largely restricted by local politics and zoning not corporate interests. There’s no conspiracy on that beyond crappy local politics.
lp92 1 days ago [-]
Who do you think is paying to keep coming that way? Businesses that have an interest in keeping it that way, for example comercial realestate companies.
tamcap 1 days ago [-]
Based on my personal observations, most of the local zoning restrictions in the US come from conservative local residents, and not a cabal of developers. The latter want to build.
And I am using the word conservative in the non-political sense here - opposed to change. The individual motivations are many, but ultimately, a lot of people tend to avoid change around where they live.
motbus3 1 days ago [-]
In large cities, housing is now being built specifically for rent, and there are many early sales opportunities available exclusively to companies.
In certain cities of Ireland, it is common for a new block of apartments to be sold out within the first hour. You get in a queue to visit on the first day and you don't even have a chance.
Schiendelman 20 hours ago [-]
Right, that's because of the political system you guys created with local councils. There's a reason it's worse there than even in the United States.
20 hours ago [-]
WillPostForFood 20 hours ago [-]
Do you think commercial real estate are backing maintaining single family zoning in places like Palo Alto, or do you think they'd actually benefit from tossing all the zoning, and being able build, sell, and rent as many office buildings and apartments and condominiumns as possible?
postingawayonhn 1 days ago [-]
Real estate development is a pretty competitive business with few barriers to entry. Nobody controls enough of the market to make it worth trying to restrict other developers.
In most cities it's developers who are pushing councils/government to rezone land so they can secure additional development sites.
ianm218 1 days ago [-]
I don’t think so - those companies are atleast modestly pro growth. They want to do more projects. In NYC and Boston local residents talk about “evil developers” who want to replace vacant lots with homes and businesses
motbus3 1 days ago [-]
I don't know about Boston case, but in Ireland it is common for developers to build and investment funds to buy it all in closed door meetings. So your only option is to rent.
In other places of the world where I lived, it was common to rent a completely different region to only find out later the company letting the house/apartment belonged to the same group.
ianm218 19 hours ago [-]
> Ireland’s planning and zoning framework is widely regarded by economists and housing experts as one of the most restrictive, bureaucratic, and hostile-to-development systems among developed common-law nations [1]
So Ireland made it almost literally illegal to build anything and it sounds like that led to bad behavior? Yes Ireland should fix corruption around building but they should also allow people to build homes.
turns out, 'you will own nothing and be happy' wasn't just a meme
motbus3 20 hours ago [-]
It never was. They were pretty serious.
mrweasel 1 days ago [-]
That just seems like such a strange offering. The number of supported devices is fairly low[0], and you already need to have purchased the game (well hold a license to the game). Some of the supported devices are Xboxes and some are Smart TVs, in that setup it would make more sense to have the TV use your own Xbox (assuming that they are on the same LAN).
The price seems a little high, as I expect them to be before tax and currency conversion, but mostly I struggle to see who this is for.
How is this number "fairly low"? It supports every Windows and Mac PC, iOS, Android, Xbox, Quest VR and most major TVs and TV sticks. What exactly are you gaming on?
mrweasel 1 days ago [-]
Okay, that might have been worded wrong. I don't the device selection as being particularly supportive of more than a few limited use cases. If you're at home it would make more sense to support your Xbox streaming to your VR headset or Smart TV, you shouldn't have to go via the cloud.
If you're out, on vacation or something, then sure streaming to your phone or tablet makes sense, but you're not going to sign in to a random Smart TV or PC with your Xbox account (at least Microsoft shouldn't encourage that behaviour). That just seems like such a limited use case to me.
apopapo 1 days ago [-]
Apparently there is no GNU/Linux support at all.
threepts 18 hours ago [-]
Seems reasonable for your average user who games 10-12 hours a week and would not want to go through the hassle of owning and maintain a physical console (plus paying electricity on that).
Mistletoe 18 hours ago [-]
When did owning a physical console become a hassle and require maintenance? I feel like I'm on crazy pills reading the comments in this thread. They can't be real.
crazygringo 17 hours ago [-]
It takes up space, you've got to clean out the dust from the fan grill every so often, it requires constant maintenance in software updates every time you turn it on, unless you leave it on all the time in which case it's using non-trivial power all the time. I have an Xbox. But there's no question that it would be a much simpler setup to not have one.
15 hours ago [-]
simoncion 17 hours ago [-]
> Seems reasonable for your average user who games 10-12 hours a week...
"XBOX Game Pass Ultimate" gives you fifteen hours per month of "cloud playtime" for 23 USD per month. "XBOX Game Pass Essential" gives you five hours per month for 10 USD per month. [0][1] You are currently unable to buy more hours (or play for "free" by watching adverts!) unless you are an "XBOX Insider"... [2][5] but, let's assume that what's in the AT article is what "XBOX Insiders" are paying.
So, uh, this seems like -as the kids say- dogwater for "your average gamer who games 10-12 hours a week". Unless I've fucked up my math, for your forty hours of play time, you're paying between 22 USD (with an "Essential) subscription and 31 USD (with an "Ultimate" subscription) per month.
You're paying 260->370 USD per year for the ability to stream the games. If you buy your consoles used, [3] you're paying enough to buy one or two mid-end XBOXes or ~three low-end XBOXes every year. [3] If we go back to new prices in that distant year of 2025, [4] you're still buying an entire XBOX every year just for the privilege of being able to play video games for a handful of hours on Saturdays and Sundays.
[5] Given that that "free" tier exists, no points shall be awarded to those who are able to predict what XBOX "cloud playtime" pricing trends are gonna look like over the next year or so... it's like dynamiting fish in a barrel.
ilikeitdark13 19 hours ago [-]
To be honest, this actually seems a bit understandable Unlike many things in gaming these days.
bentograd 19 hours ago [-]
To be honest, I think you're saying something you know no one will agree with and smuggling it under the guise of your opinion.
mrits 17 hours ago [-]
I'm at a point where if I can't stream a modern game I don't play it. I play a few hours a week and don't want my laptop to get hot.
All the other games I play are 20+ years old and I play in a windows VM.
kulahan 17 hours ago [-]
Seems pretty understandable to me too.
KeplerBoy 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
everdrive 4 hours ago [-]
I hope you've already grabbed your collections. The world will move this way and waste more of your time and your money.
Play old games, emulate, or better yet, take a walk or read books. The industry hates you and wants to waste all of your money.
rustyhancock 9 hours ago [-]
For the time being Amazon Prime memberships (in the UK atleast) includes Luna a game streaming service.
You can link most Bluetooth controllers to your fire TV stick, or chrome browser and stream games.
Hogwarts Legacy is included in standard Amazon Prime and worth playing if you want some casual fantasy open world gaming.
ChildOfChaos 23 hours ago [-]
I still miss Stadia.
It's crazy that after all this time, there still isn't anything that is better than it.
15 hours ago [-]
lapetitejort 19 hours ago [-]
I bought one game and received a Chromecast Ultra and Stadia controller at no extra cost, then had the entire purchase refunded automatically years later. Great deal!
redanddead 19 hours ago [-]
Didn't Nvidia make an alternative?
zombocomvibes 10 hours ago [-]
24 cents is like energy cost plus a dime for hogging a GPU for an hour.. not too bad?
charcircuit 10 hours ago [-]
Xcloud is about a RTX 3060 Ti which you can rent, including power and the rest of the system from $0.03 per hour as a spot price. At scale Microsoft should be able to be able to get a better price than just the hardware component.
bananzamba 1 days ago [-]
The logical conclusion of piracy and AI reverse engineering is that mire and more games will become streaming exclusives
bluescrn 1 days ago [-]
No, there'll just be fewer big-budget games. Streaming is always going to be a sub-par experience (latency and video compression). And the mess that AI made of the hardware market has likely killed off (or at least indefinitely postponed) the next generation of games consoles
But we've got 4-5 decades of games to enjoy.
Part of the reason that the games industry is struggling is that there's been no real generational leaps for a long time. Gaming used to be driven by those technological leaps, but these days we just get incremental improvements. 10-15yr old games are just as entertaining as brand new releases and often don't look too dated.
Also, ever more people are getting into retro gaming, enjoying the classics from the 80s and 90s, from well before microtransactions and hyper-competitive online multiplayer.
BoxwoodSeed 1 days ago [-]
Nevermind the generational leaps, there has been a lack of creativity and a flood of low quality titles that make it harder and harder to find the few good games among them.
I've had better luck finding great games I didn't know about from the 1990s than from the past twenty years.
mlok 1 days ago [-]
It seems to me that the indie games scene has shown quite a lot of creativity.
BoxwoodSeed 22 hours ago [-]
But how do you discover the good ones?
joenot443 19 hours ago [-]
Top ten lists written by indie gaming bloggers for each year/genre are a good place to start, honestly.
If you like 2d platforming exploration types, try Hollowknight, Celeste, VVVVVV, Ori, Animal Well. Each one is fantastic.
BoxwoodSeed 8 hours ago [-]
Where do you find trustworthy top tens?
So far, only Rusted Moss and Silksong were worth my time among the platformers I tried, which included the original Hollow Knight (platforming is too easy), Celeste (too easy A-sides, unfun B-sides) and Animal Well (too easy base game, too cryptic post game).
1 days ago [-]
jnsie 1 days ago [-]
Is this a logical conclusion or is this correlation in a time when companies in myriad industries are pushing rent over buying because margins are so much better?
Piracy has been present since the advent of the personal computer and I think it's accepted by most that some people will pay, and others just won't. I'm not sure that AI reverse engineering changes this picture.
entropi 1 days ago [-]
>Is this a logical conclusion or is this correlation in a time when companies in myriad industries are pushing rent over buying because margins are so much better?
I think both, I would argue that right now, giving hardware into the hands of your customer presents a much bigger risk nowadays. Streaming is obviously the better option for margins, and now it is basically the only option to keep the product under control. Also now that consumer GPU/memory is getting more and more expensive, I think it has become realistically the only way forward.
odo1242 20 hours ago [-]
Server GPU/memory has also been getting more expensive along with normal customer stuff. Hyperscalars with a lot of hardware do try to keep prices constant for a bit (since prices for hardware they bought is amortized), but they too are bound by economic markets and have to raise prices.
joenot443 1 days ago [-]
The majority of console play time these days is spent in online multiplayer games. I don’t think AI reverse engineering will change that.
easyThrowaway 1 days ago [-]
This, and the next generation of consoles being no less than 1600$/€ on day one.
Given they're moving to digital-only future I fully expect them to sell a "50$ + monthly subscription" dongle-like version of ps6 and xbox where you can play the game you buy as a streaming solution, or pay the aforementioned price for a "locally hosted" device on a console.
bluescrn 1 days ago [-]
I can't see the next generation ever launching unless the market recovers.
And I'm not sure we're ever going to see cheap RAM or GPUs again. There's clearly more money to be made at current price levels, and not much potential for competition to fix the market.
Hamuko 1 days ago [-]
They can certainly try but I'm not convinced that gamers are gonna latch onto the idea. Sure, a new GTA game might be able to do it to a certain level of success, but I'm not sure a Gears of War: E-Day will be able to get people to pay a constant subscription to stream it. Indie games will almost certainly not go streaming exclusive, so you'll now be competing even more fiercely with indies and older games.
password54321 1 days ago [-]
Your "logical conclusion" ignores that many popular games rely on online content anyway. You still need their servers without needing it to be streamed.
Chris2048 1 days ago [-]
> Your "logical conclusion" ignores that
Why did you have to phrase it like this, instead of just bringing up your own counterpoint?
Also, I'd see the concern here as where the code runs: if there is a dependency on the server to pull down code/assets, but it still runs it locally, then there is still an opportunity to pirate it locally - So this isn't a point about cloud-dependence, but AI/piracy specifically pushing execution to the server side.
password54321 1 days ago [-]
Treating anti-consumer practices as the "logical conclusion" while failing to give one is annoying. What you stated doesn't solve the fact that many people want to play games with others online, it is not just about assets.
Chris2048 7 hours ago [-]
> doesn't solve the fact that many people want to play games with others online
What does this have to do with this? I'm not sure you understand the point being made..
password54321 6 hours ago [-]
>Why did you have to phrase it like this, instead of just bringing up your own counterpoint?
>What does this have to do with this? I'm not sure you understand the point being made..
Chris, buddy. We probably should not talk on this platform again. Have a great day!
Chris2048 2 hours ago [-]
and yet you quote me as if to make a point. Feel free to duck out.
1 days ago [-]
redanddead 19 hours ago [-]
this isn't the way to defeat piracy
izacus 1 days ago [-]
Can you walk us though your thought process here? Is piracy actually a problem? How is taking away ability to play offline a "logical conclusion"? Based on what evidence?
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
Corporations are monopolists and they are very angry about the fact you can just decompile any game and even port it to new platforms with AI.
zurn 1 days ago [-]
How does this compare to Geforce Now cost, where AIUI you also play games you bought?
odo1242 20 hours ago [-]
GeForce Now is $9.99 for 100 hours of playtime (but the hours do expire)
TiredOfLife 1 days ago [-]
Close in price, but 5080 is much faster than the Series S they use for streaming
mrheosuper 13 hours ago [-]
Series S ? Not even Series X, Jesus the greediness.
18 hours ago [-]
ocd 1 days ago [-]
Eventually, US intellectual property law will have the legitimacy of deeds for property on the Moon.
mkotlikov 15 hours ago [-]
With Reverse Engineer Anything it will be only a matter of time before it's the only way to play!
sailingparrot 15 hours ago [-]
Will Reverse Engineer Anything also reverse engineer an xbox and materialize it out thin air? Because if not I don't see how that help.
MS is charging you 24 to 40 cent to rent a GPU so you can play without having to buy hardware, they aren't charging you to play your game on your own hardware.
gxs 20 hours ago [-]
For all the apologists and people saying it’s not a big deal:
The problem is that this is the entry point to do more nefarious things later
Companies love to boil the frog - introduce something and later jack up the price or take something else away or something like that
I at least am always weary of new stuff like this
odo1242 20 hours ago [-]
Doesn't seem like much of a good deal relative to competitor services, especially GeForce now at 10 cents per hour
The divide between those that can own their own consoles and those that are forced to feed the cloud quarter-by-quarter like an old-timey arcade is widening, and this sucks.
danbruc 1 days ago [-]
$1200 translates to 5000 hours of streaming, so you have to play quite a lot before having your own console would be cheaper.
gregoryl 1 days ago [-]
500 hours; sorry, we increased the price after streaming became the only option.
kotaKat 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, those are "introductory prices", after all...
mrheosuper 12 hours ago [-]
About 4 years if you play 4 hours everyday, with 128 days off during the 4 years.
But after 4 years you still have your own console that you can sell.
skyyler 1 days ago [-]
Consoles don't go away when the subscription ends or when the company goes away or stops supporting it.
I know my N64 has more than 5000 hours on it, and I'm fairly certain it'll still be in working condition when I die.
danbruc 1 days ago [-]
Do most people keep their old consoles or do they generally replace them with a newer one? And even if they keep them, do they actually use them or do they end up in the attic? And I guess you could always get one ten years after the release for little money.
pirates 1 days ago [-]
I keep every single one and if there’s a game I want to play that I already own I’ll play it on its original console instead of emulating it or buying a remake/remaster. When I have company over everyone has a great time re-discovering the things we loved about them and appreciating the advancements we’ve made. There is something different about passing the controller around between levels on Mega Man X or playing Melee on its original hardware.
danbruc 20 hours ago [-]
I have no doubt that people do this, I also still have my Game Boy and Mega Drive lying around somewhere, but the question is whether this is common.
gspr 1 days ago [-]
/s/consoles/whatevers/
/s/cloud/rentseekers/
conductr 20 hours ago [-]
Want to sell mine, haven’t played it in over 2 years. Wish they’d send me the offer .
schnitzelstoat 1 days ago [-]
I'd rather pay 40 cents per hour than have to pay really inflated prices for the games like Stadia had.
Ultimately, you end up paying for the usage somehow.
officeplant 1 days ago [-]
Hey technically we all made money on stadia. Bought the Cyberpunk 2077 bundle which came with a stadia kit with controller and chromecast 4k. For around $70-80 if memory serves me correct. Played it for a while and hated that the controller was wifi for direct stadia connection and only wired if I wanted to use it for anything else on my PC/phone. Sold the controller/chromecast bundle on ebay for $90. Continued to play Cyberpunk and Destiny2 over Stadia with mouse and keyboard until the service shutdown and Google refunded me for the original purchase.
TiredOfLife 1 days ago [-]
Stadia didn't have infalted prices
neuwirth 1 days ago [-]
I don't think this is inherently unreasonable, keeping in mind that gaming cafes are (perhaps quickly becoming a were) a thing, and in those you were usually provided some set of games that the center owned or licensed, but also allowed to log in via something like Steam and play your own games. Xbox / Consoles in general were already a walled garden compared to, say, GOG, and heading towards this streaming model being the default is only a step further in the obvious direction.
paxy 1 days ago [-]
Maybe things are different now but I have never seen a single gaming cafe in my life where the games were "owned or licensed". We all know how they operated.
forsalebypwner 1 days ago [-]
Not my experience - this place is long closed now, but a shop near me used to offer access to steam accounts that were managed through Steam's PC Café Program.
wonder if they can bring the cost down. with all the streaming needed it may be possible to cut down on all the fancy graphical effects.
__m 15 hours ago [-]
Isn’t that the appeal though, that you get AAA graphics on a phone? At least that’s why i used streaming.
krystalgamer 5 hours ago [-]
similar to how Netflix offers 4K but at much lower bitrate when compared to Blu-ray. the engineers have spent a considerable amount of time optimizing the encoding presets to be acceptable by the majority of their audience.
even though phones have 1080p resolutions, the pixel density is so high you could get away with the more minute detail that would be obvious on a 24' screen.
currently Xbox games are made to be played on regular monitors the devs are optimizing for that.
I remember when PS3 online was free but enough XBOX Cawadoody Halo 2KSports gamers were happy to pay extra for… I’m not sure what… that it was normalized and so Sony got in on that too and made the whole industry more expensive.
Reminds me of the enshittttification of TV where every new system starts off ad free and then adds ads anyways.
m4rtink 1 days ago [-]
The Xbox reboot seems to be going well - but looks more like Xbox shutdown from the outside.
bluescrn 1 days ago [-]
It's a bit of a mess at the moment, with the ExBox and the PwnedStation.
10 hours ago [-]
bjord 1 days ago [-]
frankly, if I'm playing a game I own on a remote server, I expect to pay something for that
and I don't actually think that's substantially different from other competitors, like geforce now
whether I will choose to play it on a different server in the first place is a different question (I won't)
Reubachi 1 days ago [-]
I totally agree with you. there's a cost benefit analysis we make when purchasing something and I can imagine the case where I'm ok paying 50c an hour for a remote game.
It's hard though not to see the writing on the wall in regards to "local compute GPU availability". Every single industry even tangentially related to compute power has "silently" moved their bus model to consumption based, despite the consumer base having 0 appetite for that. (We're not engineers/app developers who are forced to use LLM agents, we're trying to pay a service that hosts games.)
I am unsure how a medium that was a failure as a free/subscription model will succeed as a floating pay-as-you-go model.
brody_hamer 1 days ago [-]
For a period of time I would rent a windows box with gpu from aws, install my game, and play it over parsec (a Remote Desktop tool designed for low latency). It was around $0.40/hour for a high-end gaming rig for the ~40 hours I needed to binge my new game. I play new games infrequently, so the cost analysis was “a new computer for $1500, or rent one for the time I need it for $15.”
It’s just a bummer that this process wasn’t a bit easier. I recall there was some setup involved.
simoncion 17 hours ago [-]
> ...a new computer for $1500...
How often do you buy new computers? I paid something like 2500 USD for my Threadripper machine (including 128 GB of RAM and graphics card) ~seven years ago. Between now and then I paid ~580 USD (at the end of last year) to get a new graphics card and that's it. After last year's upgrade, I've yet to run into a game that it doesn't play reasonably, and I've also gotten a lot of work done with it over all the years I've had it.
The console lifecycles being like a decade long has been a fantastic blessing for us PC gamers. Most AAA games are intended to run well on those ancient almost-PCs, which means that our old actually-PCs usually play the games just fine.
brody_hamer 5 hours ago [-]
For me it’s about the infrequency at which I play new titles. I might play one game every 2-3 years?
I bought a used Xbox series s for $200, and I’ve logged maybe 10 hours on it in the last two years?
So… take my perspective with a grain of salt, I expect im an outlier.
bjord 1 days ago [-]
from your perspective this feels like a positive, then, no? cheaper price per hour, no requirement that you use those hours all at once?
Reubachi 1 days ago [-]
It's a positive in the sense that the industry has made it marginally cheaper in time/resources to pay-as-you-go.
It's a positive in the sense that due to these industry changes (computer power going up 20x in cost.), the platforms are offering a way to let us peons play games.
It's a negative in that it's a futher commitment of these vendors to hoarde compute/GPU power from western consumers and chinese LLM vendors.
MS will routinely purchase the highest end GPU for sake of keeping this service alive, nevermind their own LLM. Good luck getting one yourself.
bjord 1 days ago [-]
agreed
bjord 1 days ago [-]
yep, actually in my area this will be cheaper than the gaming cafes people frequent—I think the lack of reasonably-local servers is the main thing that will block adoption.
I'm not so certain the average gamer is well-informed enough to realize what they're giving up, or that they feel strongly enough to take a stand for it if they do. I'm hopeful they will, we'll see.
forgotpwd16 1 days ago [-]
Seems the important part is that Game Pass included Cloud Gaming. Now, they mostly strip it off (left few hours monthly) and charge it extra. In contrast, Sony still retains unlimited streaming in PS+.
bjord 1 days ago [-]
didn't realize that, though I wouldn't be surprised then if it also changes on sony's end
OGWhales 1 days ago [-]
Yup, the input lag is not something I can stomach. Even in pretty optimal network conditions, it's very noticeable. Other people may be less sensitive to it than me, so they may find this to be nice. I do worry about a longer term trend of pushing cloud over local hardware for gaming, which was never something I seriously considered until recently with hardware prices being what they are.
rpq 14 hours ago [-]
They want people with money to be the only people good at the games. The playing field will be: hours producing skill where skill is now weighted towards having more money because that’s how you get hours now. Weird take? Oh wait. :)
giancarlostoro 20 hours ago [-]
Ah, so their game streaming platform is taking away from their AI inference business?
1 days ago [-]
cubefox 14 hours ago [-]
Ars Technica tends to use the most inflammatory, bad-faith headlines possible. They try to induce outrage in their audience, because this is what drives clicks.
rvz 1 days ago [-]
> In September, when Microsoft severely limited the game-streaming buffet available to Game Pass subscribers, the company said non-subscribers would soon be able to “purchase cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store and stream eligible games they own on supported devices.”
Game pass always has been a scam [0] for years and now here we have the ghost of Stadia in Xbox services as streaming games make it into non subscribers.
You will still own nothing, stream everything and be very happy when the game is simulated with a world model.
I can't buy a reasonably priced GPU to run games on anymore anyway
shmerl 19 hours ago [-]
I prefer GOG. You buy it, it's yours.
TiredOfLife 10 hours ago [-]
How in any way your post is related?
double0jimb0 20 hours ago [-]
How about someone capitalize on the billions of gigs of video card hardware available in these data centers to render and stream games of unfathomable amount realism?
MiroslavPokorny 17 hours ago [-]
Welcome to the new American economy.
The nickle and dime tax.
PcChip 1 days ago [-]
It’s not unreasonable since you’re using their compute
I mean I would never stream a game, but still
bossyTeacher 1 days ago [-]
With Sony's scheming and this, the high-end console industry is killing itself.
m4rtink 1 days ago [-]
Finally. And nothing of value will be lost as a result, especially with open but easy to use devices, like Steam hardware & co widely available.
cwillu 1 days ago [-]
Alas, the signed-kernel-anticheat monster is approaching and, mark my words, will drag linux into an indistiguishable hell if it takes off.
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, it sucks. These are corporations whose business it is to restrict our freedom. Their software is literal malware meant to pwn our machine and restrict what we can do. Their invasiveness is the least of it.
I advocated so much against it. I was so sad when I saw that virtually nobody cared. It seems games are more important than freedom.
mrheosuper 12 hours ago [-]
Let be real, we all trade a part of freedom for something.
If you want true freedom, you should follow Richard Stallman.
matheusmoreira 5 hours ago [-]
I do follow him. I use AGPLv3 on all the code I publish. Stallman saw far into the future and predicted much of this decades ago.
There is a problem though: he talks about software freedom, not computer freedom.
Right now we can make free software ourselves and enjoy the freedom that brings, but the war on general purpose computing rages on and it threatens to invalidate all of our efforts. Free software is completely pointless if our computers start refusing to run it.
We need to enshrine computer freedom into law and literally ban stuff like remote attestation. We also need distributed computer manufacturing technology so that normal people can simply create their own free computers at home just like they can create free software at home.
Hikikomori 1 days ago [-]
Would like to see the ability to boot into a secure system that only has the game and maybe discord.
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
Would like these corporations to just accept they have no control and stop trying to "secure" themselves against us.
Hikikomori 1 days ago [-]
Quite a few billion dollar games that can't function then.
m4rtink 1 days ago [-]
Well, some things are just not meant to be if we are to survive as a healthy society. We had feudalism, asbestos and lead in gasoline. If we could get rid of those, we can get rid of questionable totalitarianism peddling games as well.
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
Let them stop functioning. Our computing freedom is far more important than video games. If they want to sell us games, they should have to acquiesce to our terms, not the other way around.
tancop 23 hours ago [-]
Linux with EAC is better than Windows with EAC. A million users on a 95% free OS is better than 100k on a totally free one and 900k on a 0% free. And that's not counting the fact that the free distros you want will continue to exist because not everyone plays online games.
matheusmoreira 18 hours ago [-]
We shouldn't be forced to choose between a free system and one where we can play online games. They should just have to accept the fact they have no control and deal with it. Nobody cares how much it costs them.
If you want to see what happens when you compromise on this, all you have to do is look at mobile operating systems. They're all owned by corporations and governments, and it's enforced by hardware remote attestation. Install a custom system where you're in control? Attestation fails. You're banned from everything, you get no service anywhere, you are ostracized from digital society, you become a second class citizen. Mark my words: one day we will need remote attestation just to connect to the internet.
Not everyone plays online games, but most people need communications apps, banking apps, government apps. Our "free distros" will be nothing but paperweights soon if we don't find a way literally outlaw remote attestation. I think people are really underestimating what's truly at stake here.
cwillu 12 hours ago [-]
Exactly.
I say this as someone who plays games that are significantly aided by remote-attestation-based anticheat: it's a beachhead that we will regret ceding.
Hikikomori 23 hours ago [-]
You're also free not playing their games. I grew up hosting my own game servers so I'm no stranger to that, but I also enjoy games that are not compatible with that.
It also doesn't really matter if they have kernel stuff or not, unless you game on a different user a user space process can already read all your files and even memory of your processes.
matheusmoreira 19 hours ago [-]
We're also free to hack the games and make them work the way we want. Just like we can install uBlock Origin and kill advertising.
The computers are ours. We are the gods of our digital realms. Their software is running under our control. This "take it or leave it" nonsense doesn't really fly. Adversarial interoperability means there's any number of options available to us.
The notion that people would willingly give up this godlike power just to play online video games without cheaters is one of the saddest ideas I've ever come across. Gamers would reduce our personal computers to consoles without a shred of guilt. I barely have words to express how I feel about that.
Hikikomori 19 hours ago [-]
Modding and such is fine, even in MP games when expected. But that's not the reason for protections were talking about, cheating is. People are breaking the social contract of competitive games. Booting into a special environment just for competitive games would allow both to coexist.
matheusmoreira 18 hours ago [-]
> cheating
Not a problem. It's their computer, they can edit the game's memory to freeze their character's hitpoints or look through walls if they really want to. As the owners of the machine, it's their god given right.
> People are breaking the social contract of competitive games.
This is not even remotely close to being worth sacrificing our freedom and leverage over. Let it happen. Play with friends you know and trust instead of internet randoms.
> Booting into a special environment just for competitive games would allow both to coexist.
There will never be such a "special environment" for games. Every government and corporation under the sun wants this for much more sinister reasons. The notion that this will be limited to video games is laughable. Video game are merely how they are selling this subversion to you.
Either your computer is yours or it's not. And if your computer allows strangers to set up an untouchable embassy within your system where they can do anything they want and remain forever beyond your reach, then it's not really your computer, is it? It's the corporation's computer, they're just generously allowing you to use it... Provided you follow their silly policies and rules.
The abuses that will materialize if we allow them to get away with this nonsense will put science fiction to shame.
Hikikomori 6 hours ago [-]
So even murder is okay under your philosophy? It's just a social contract that stops it and it's your nature given right to murder other life forms.
This is happening irregardless of what your wants are. Booting into a self contained game image allows both to co exist, rather than Epic and such locking down normal distros.
matheusmoreira 5 hours ago [-]
Let's not compare computer issues with murder. And of course it is happening regardless of what we want: trillion dollar industries and governments want this. We're nothing to these people.
Coexist? That's total nonsense. This is merely a temporary solution for them. The end game is the total destruction of computing freedom as we know it today. Video games are just the first thing they will take away from you. They also want your encryption, your local AIs, your torrents, your adblockers, your emulators, anything and everything that harms their bottom line and subverts their laws in any way.
Soon you will no longer be allowed to boot into anything that will give you any form of control. It's the war on general purpose computing, cheating in online games is completely irrelevant next to that. The democratization of cryptography allows citizens to defeat police, judges, even literal spies. Computers are too subversive to allow us citizens to own them, they think we should only have computers that run a restricted set of government signed executables. It's the end of everything the word "hacker" ever stood for.
What makes it especially hilarious in a sad way is the fact that this is what makes personal computers truly special. Consoles are just locked down computers, we're the ones who have freedom. Considerable effort is spent on jailbreaking consoles precisely to restore that freedom. Yet the PC gamers seem to be almost eager to "coexist" with these hostile corporations whose entire mission is to reduce our computers to appliances.
cwillu 21 hours ago [-]
> even memory of your processes
That's not a thing on the default config of any mainstream distro I'm aware of; everyone restricts attaching a debugger and similar to root by default these days.
Hikikomori 20 hours ago [-]
For Linux no, not for the last 15 years or so. For windows yes, still possible.
But AC is kinda useless on Linux anyway, might as well have none.
cwillu 10 hours ago [-]
I don't think we're talking about the same thing, I was specifically referring to Epic Games' efforts to add effective AC to linux via secureboot + signed kernels + a kernel module + remote attestation
The entire point is to lock down a user's linux install so that they can't interfere with the anticheat.
Hikikomori 6 hours ago [-]
Had missed those news, previous EAC and all other Linux AC have been completely useless. Would still prefer to boot into a game image that is locked down rather than Epic requiring me to lock down normal distros.
matheusmoreira 6 hours ago [-]
That is so disgusting... They're never going to stop, will they?
cwillu 1 days ago [-]
That kills so many valid setups that it's a complete non-starter.
criddell 1 days ago [-]
I'm sure game companies agree and realize those machines will be excellent clients for their game streaming service.
It probably isn't far off where AAA games are only available via streaming simply because not enough people are willing to buy $1500 consoles and $100+ games.
pjmlp 1 days ago [-]
You mean Windows desktops, because Steam hardware depends on Windows game developers as source of games.
swiftcoder 1 days ago [-]
Even consoles still rely on gamedevs running Windows to do the actual development. No reason steam boxes won't end up as a native target for those same developers, assuming Valve plays their cards right
pjmlp 1 days ago [-]
The difference being no AAA studios are targeting Proton on purpose.
As for Valve itself, many probably won't find Valve that great when the new management generation takes over, and is no longer Gabe calling the shots.
Forgeties79 1 days ago [-]
The two pillars of what made console gaming so enticing for years were cost and convenience. I love my gaming PC, but there is nothing as seamless as sitting on my couch, pressing the middle button on my PlayStation or Xbox, and jumping right back into a game that was in a quick suspend state. Even my PS4 still sees action due to the convenience factor.
Love my steam deck, but the dock/handheld experience isn’t as seamless as switch and flipping from desktop to gaming mode had a like 15% chance of freezing the device until maybe 18-24mo ago. There was also that update issue for years if you left your home network.
Xbox/Switch/Playstation are incredibly reliable and turnkey (and until recently, a low upfront cost). It’s why people turned to them by the millions.
bossyTeacher 1 days ago [-]
It seems like the industry is on a quest to see what's the maximum price that people will pay for convenience
Forgeties79 1 days ago [-]
Then they will point to people not buying and blame anyone but themselves lol. I can’t imagine even thinking about the PS6. The PS5 is basically a final fantasy machine. The library is pathetic compared to PS4. And Xbox…come on. Rumors of $1600-$1800 price tag? I built a PC for less. Used to be you couldn’t build a comparable PC for a console’s price until easily 3-4yr into the console cycle.
close04 1 days ago [-]
> open but easy to use devices, like Steam hardware & co widely available
The problem was never the hardware. Consoles and PCs were both a compromise, a trade between convenience, flexibility, price. The easy to use devices from Steam are more console than PC and that's fine. Nobody has a problem with this as long as games run. If the game runs well I don't care about the CPU, RAM, OS, or that I can't upgrade them. I don't spend money on RAM for the sake of plugging things in, I spend it because the system needs it. The Steam Machine is a step towards "consolification" from a PC perspective. The Deck is a true console. So saying "finally consoles are gone" should be more "consoles are dead, long live consoles".
The big problem that only recently got prominence is ownership of the games. Take away the brand loyalty and you'll see that Steam isn't really doing much here. But I care about being able to buy and sell my games, or play them for as long as a compatible system is available. In this regard the Steam store is not much different from console stores. It offers some quality of life features but the core is still missing. It's not my game anymore and this comes with a lot of implications that aren't mitigated by running Linux or having RAM slots.
zdp7 16 hours ago [-]
No Valve system is console like. The PC / Console difference has always been that consoles are a walled garden. Consoles are PCs
to be easy to use and not allow unauthorized software to run on it.
close04 9 hours ago [-]
> No Valve system is console like.
That entire paragraph makes it obvious that I'm talking about hardware. From the first sentence that spells it out, to talking about upgrading RAM. On the software front, the "open" PC ecosystem is heading in a bad direction for consumers too. So what if I can install from any store if they all rent me the same game at the same price? The difference between Valve and Epic is that one has a loyal following of promoters but in the end I don't own the game, I'm only renting it. And we're always one step away from rentseeking and or losing access even to those rentals.
muyuu 1 days ago [-]
i find the entire concept alien and i have zero interest in becoming a customer in such models, so i'm not into it and i might be misinterpreting things, but aren't those games you never "bought" in the first place?
i mean, it sounds like it's a subscription plan and some extra session passes added on, not like you actually bought a game at any point, correct me if i'm wrong
tancop 23 hours ago [-]
No, this explicitly doesn't work for Game Pass. You can only play a selection of games you paid for (or free to play ones).
That means most of the average Xbox user's library is not supported, and if you're paying for Game Pass you almost definitely have a physical Xbox that can stream any game you have installed for free.
This has zero value for players. Streaming can have two business models - you pay a subscription to stream games you already own outside the platform like GeForce Now, or buy on the platform and stream for free like Stadia.
Xbox is charging per hour and making players buy games they already own through Game Pass.
TiredOfLife 1 days ago [-]
Renting, it's renting the device.
You need to drill a hole into a concrete wall once - you rent the drill. You spend every day drilling countless holes - you buy the drill.
muyuu 1 days ago [-]
for the device, the analogy works better, like with coin op arcade machines back in the day
in this case, you're clearly not allocating a device for your sole usage for a given period of time; it's a gaming SAAS, which isn't really renting
TiredOfLife 9 hours ago [-]
Physically xcloud runs on Series X boards where each board is software divided in 4 Series S. When you stream a game you have sole usage of the 1/4 of the phisical device
muyuu 3 hours ago [-]
like with any SaaS, but what you're charging is not remotely amortisation plus a profit margin - that barely enters the equation, hence why it's a bit of a stretch to call it renting
raziel2701 15 hours ago [-]
You will own nothing and be happy
Tangurena2 1 days ago [-]
> Say what you will about the old arcade model, but you didn’t have to buy the cabinet and then pay a quarter per play
I'm unhappy that the Kinect got removed from the Xbox and with this sort of nonsense, I won't be purchasing any sort of replacement from Microsoft.
Fairburn 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
otikik 1 days ago [-]
Oh no!
Anyway...
Rendered at 16:50:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It's a bit of a grey area, and it's not true that Nvidia needs to have a licensing deal. It's definitely against the license terms you get when you purchase a game through steam to run it on arbitrary hardware, but most (at least EU) courts would probably hold that if you own a game, you can run it on any hardware you have access to.
What happened was that when Nvidia just got started, they had an opt-out framework (for developers) instead of opt-in. At the time, some game developers felt like Nvidia was profiting off of their work unfairly, and posted publicly about it, and there was a decent-sized backlash.
However, in the meantime, other competing streaming platforms have gone with opt-out and there hasn't been much of an issue around it. I think most developers have come around to the idea that it increases game sales.
Is it??? I don't see anything in the Steam agreement about what hardware I am using?
Here's a random example from the Skyrim EULA:
Is this even legally enforceable? Technically I'd be in violation if I was playing the same copy of Skyrim on both my PC and my Steam Deck.
IANAL, but if it was ever tried, surely the clause would be struck down as invalid?
Btw you are also free to violate the license agreement between you and Bethesda - in a lot of cases, national law precedes licensing agreements. And often because there is no consequence for you violating it. I.e.
I also violate Youtubes ToS by using adblock - so what?
If they are providing you a service through which you infringe someone's copyright (by playing a video game in violation of its licensing agreement) in exchange for giving them money, then they are risking a lawsuit. If they knowingly enable infringement (e.g. by rolling out a gaming service that lists and can automatically install games where they know, or could easily have checked, that the terms do not allow you to install on such a service), then they probably run a higher risk than if they don't knowingly enable it (e.g. by letting you rent cloud machines with GPUs, completely blind to what you're running on them), but in both cases they run a risk.
I'm sure there's a lot of law, and case law, that sets boundaries for this, but I could easily imagine cloud gaming falling on the wrong side of the boundaries.
Cloud gaming is too small to be relevant in any way. That’s why it’s ignored.
They certainly aren't launching it on a different game-streaming service or intending to compete with it. Withdrawing doesn't make customers buy more of their games either - probably less.
So why would they be withdrawing from licensing agreements that are effectively free money for them?
For DRM and ban avoidance detection this means either false positives (which is bad rep) or if it's tuned to ignore those signals on specific service provider hardware makes it easier to do account sharing (and thus not buying the game).
We'll be fine as long as we have an open platform to play good games from studios that haven't sold out, and without interference of anti-competitive gatekeepers, but we need to defend our right to use these open platforms - definitely the PC, and if we could find a way to align, I think we could regain ground on android/ios as well.
coming from someone who thought they'd refresh their PC in 2026 (planned this in 2024), i agree. getting priced out feels like the first step in the wrong direction.
Lawyer reasons: Because they have lost the rights themselves. They may have licensed things like artwork/music for sale during a fixed period and so ongoing subscriptions, continual resales, would require renewing those licenses. Just look at the recent re-release of Mike Tyson's Punch Out, which had to remove Mike Tyson.
Evil reasons: They want to publish a new version of a game, say SimCity 11. The target audience is largely people already playing SimCity 10. So they discontinue SimCity 10, turn it off, to "encourage" the customer base to forget SimCity 10 and "purchase" SimCity 11.
Petty rich guy personal reasons: Say you are George Lucas and you have published something embarrassingly awful, like a Star Wars Christmas Special. The die-hard fans love it, or at least want to see it. But you are embarrassed. So you discontinue any concept of streaming/rental/sales to hide your shame, regardless of profit motivations. Also, Han shot first!
The world of IP isn't just about selling someone something, it's about reselling the same person that thing many times over. So now I have my VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, digital streaming, 4K digital streaming, 4K digital streaming HD collectors edition, etc. variants.
And of course if there are multiple cloud gaming providers, they see it as an opportunity to extort each of them.
When GFN first came out it had all of the Civilization games -- and it worked great -- but then as other cloud gaming options appeared 2K pulled the whole catalog, presumably with hand out. When Civ VII came out they suddenly allowed it all again, not only to rekindle interest in the series and presumably because some people were only going to buy the game if they could play it on the platform.
Just a correction: Netcafes don't have to get special licences. I'm not aware of any such licences existing anymore. They just buy however many standard retail copies or online accounts they want. Sometimes a publisher will see the marketing value and will provide some copies/licences at no charge.
Going back 15-20 years or so, Valve used to run a "Cybercafe Program" that was a large monthly expense for cybercafes, but shut it down after a while because it wasn't worth the cost of administration. Now cybercafes buy Steam accounts same as any end user. Asking any publisher for a cybercafe or "commercial exploitation" licence always invoked the response "Um - no idea?" from any department you asked, coupled with "We're afraid to suggest anything" from the legal department and "just use standard copies I suppose?" from the marketing department.
- They have majority of popular games already installed but you need to log in to your own steam account and only have access to the games you already own.
- They provide an in-house account and offer games available in that account to be played. This is usually for cafes offering playtime for console games.
- Partnerships with games studios/publishers, but really I only know about this in Korean PC Bangs for specific games where some content is locked. For example in League of Legends, you unlock playable characters over the course of playing the game so a low level account might not have the full roster unlocked. If you log in your account to affiliated PC Bangs, you have all characters unlocked while playing there.
I've seen tech videos from LTT and alike where they build remote gaming rigs using windows Hyper-V with GPU passthrough to the guest - that is essetially what they should do, and let me rent a virtual machine with hardware support and low latency video compression. I don't see a reason you would need any licensing deals there.
Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee to play it on your tablet.
Of course, free game streaming was never a viable business model, so this isn't unexpected, but people aren't going to love the change either way.
This is about not buying the expensive piece of hardware. Then obviously it makes sense to charge you for the expensive hardware you're now using in the cloud. Or if you bought the expensive piece of hardware, but for some reason are choosing to use an Xbox in the cloud instead.
Game streaming from the cloud has never been part of the licensing of purchasing a game. It's always been part of a monthly Game Pass subscription. And with games in Game Pass, you don't even have to buy the game in the first place.
I get that some people may not love the change, but it's just more accurately reflecting costs, and there's absolutely no bait-and-switch here. Nothing has changed about what comes with a game you purchased. Nothing at all.
The industry is scared of recompiling and how AI has driven costs for people to host their own servers. That includes games like GTA where a lot of recurring revenue is from people spending money in online mode.
Microsoft would "solve" that issue, as well as normalize more players to spend monthly instead of once.
“Nothing changes” for your DVD/CDs when Netflix and Spotify arrived.
I personally have my doubts this is going to work, but the thing this model does open up is mainstream games having LLM driven NPCs.
Perfect quote to summarize the direction of modern gaming. People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave. Remember when Oblivion horse armor was over the line? Literally everything has gotten worse from that point despite no one being happy about it.
---
PS1 = 102 million units sold
PS2 = 160
PS3 = 87 million
PS4 = 117 million
PS5 = 95 million (June 2026)
---
These numbers would be bad alone, but two things make them especially awful. The first is that there's no meaningful competition anymore. XBox has completely dropped the ball whereas the PS2 initially had the original XBox (which wasn't great, but had novelty going for it), Dreamcast, GameCube, and others all viably competing in the same approximate domain.
The second is that when the PS2 launched in 2000 the US population was 281 million. Now it's 349 million. I'm using US as a proxy for rest of the world, instead of the global population, since we're mostly interested in the developed world as that's the market for game consoles. So the break-even point in terms of marketshare relative to the PS2 would be 349/281*160 = 199 million units sold, and that's if we assume significant competition.
So not only are people leaving consoles, they're leaving in droves. And that leaves the companies squeezing their shrinking player bases even harder, which will make people leave even more quickly. They've lost around 50% of their adjust playerbase over the past 20 years, and at this rate I doubt game consoles will even exist in 20 more years.
N64/PS1/Saturn: 146 million units sold worldwide
GC/PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox: 214
Wii/PS3/Xbox 360: 275
WiiU/Switch/PS4/Xbox One: 338
Switch 2/PS5/Xbox Series: 150
So since only the last generation has lower number of units sold, it seems to me that the market for console is either only recently declining, or the cycle is much longer and people takes more time to buy the new generation.
I'd also observe, vice versa, that after Nintendo jumped on the bandwagon of charging players to use their own internet connection that their sales started declining significantly. I don't know if it's causal; even people who chose to opt out themselves might not even really know. What I mean is that this feeling of getting nickeled and dimed is going to imperil fun in some impossible to quantify fashion, and if these various actions hit another completely unquantifiable breaking point, then you start losing players in yet another unquantifiable way - until suddenly you notice that people just don't seem to want what you're offering anymore.
--
EDIT: And I had a chuckle seeing a topic just posted: "Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier" [1]
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205934
One aspect that springs to mind immediately looking at that timeline is the rise of mobile, it wouldn't have happened immediately at launch (around 2007) but has been a building wave that meant practically everyone has a games device in their pocket. For audiences of certain genres is all they need where they might have contributed to the overall picture of dedicated gaming devices, leaving other gamers and companies to balance the books for other genres that are left.
'Shareholder value' is another problem. Shareholders, in general, do not hold shares of companies because they want those companies to succeed, but because they expect returns from those companies. If they can get a 50% return and then have the company die in a fiery blaze, most shareholders would be perfectly fine with that so long as they were reasonably confident that they wouldn't, themselves, get burnt. So you have shareholders with no interest in the long-term similarly aligned with executives who have no interest in the long-run.
There's also probably more technical issues like discounting earnings over time. A penny earned today is generally considered significantly more valuable than a penny earned tomorrow by companies due to inflation, opportunity cost, and other such issues. So even if you think the long-term is relevant, the expected earnings cost would have to be dramatic to make it comparable to the impact of next quarter.
But from the PS4 onward, the consoles were made of a relatively lightly modified retail hardware that was sold for profit as quickly as possible. Both the PS4 and PS5 were being sold for profit (on the hardware), less than a year after launch. I think this was due to again companies squeezing a shrinking playerbase even harder, to try to maintain profit levels.
I think the obsession on next quarter, while pretending that there's no such thing as long-term consequences, is eating companies alive. Because there are absolutely long-term consequences.
https://www.vgchartz.com/
https://www.vgchartz.com/tools/hw_date.php?reg=Global&ending...
But later on in the generation, Sony made big price cuts and went hard putting out very good exclusive games that people bought systems for. By the end, they beat out Microsoft in sales.
Then the lead-up to the Xbox One launch was such a PR disaster which the another comment covered. The PS4 continued getting great exclusive games while Microsoft's big IPs like Halo and Gears of War more or less fell out of relevancy if not had their brand destroyed by new entries that didn't impress fans. They spent way too much time and effort trying to make the Kinect the future of Xbox in hopes of replicating Nintendo's success with the Wii, years after the novelty of motion controls stopped impressing anyone.
The unfortunate thing is they dropped the ball so hard that Sony basically stopped trying in the latest generation. Sony is pissing people off left and right but they're still winning because they have no direct competition (Nintendo has been off doing their own thing since the Wii)
They are not doing super amazing this gen. Reports have them selling 1/3rd the units of PlayStation 5, Game Pass has stalled, they apparently used a JIT manufacturing setup and so were much more affected by the component shortage, so a console that was $500 at launch is now $800.
Funnily enough, because they put in serials into Xbox One games for tracking they did recently launch a really cool disc to digital service that gives the best benefits of physical and digital.
1. Concentrating on Cable (LOL in retrospect, but controlling the living room was always the plan so I get it) 2. Getting rid of physical games
People usually dont - until the levies break, and they do. The PlayStation 4 won its generation, because people left XBox for it, in part, over game sharing (or lack thereof)
So shocking in hindsight how ms never realized this formula as it was happening and let it wither on the vine.
A lot of big tech companies want to bring back those time because they believe the few decades in between where people owned and controlled their devices and software in a very open computing ecosystem were a mistake. So the aim now is to give you a device you pay for and use but never fully control, and software or media that you rent but never own.
Right, but those people also don't own Xbox games. So this goes from "add-on fee to play the games your already own conveniently", to "buy a $60 game and then pay $/hour to actually play it"
Are you saving money in the second scenario vs buying a console? Almost certainly. But it doesn't feel that way to the person paying a big whack upfront and then also stacks of game time.
It turns out that the customer's perception of a product is pretty vital to its performance in the marketplace. The math can math just fine, but if the customer doesn't feel good about it, you don't make the sale.
Subscriptions try to soften the blow of a big purchase by lowering the monthly payments under your "casual expenditures" threshold. Upfront payments reward you with an immediate sense of ownership, and no recurring anxiety about affording the item.
Combining the two in this particular order is sort of the worst of both worlds - there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...
Balloon payment loans are very rare in the United States. I don't know where you live but I don't think you realize how unusual balloon payment loans are.
What (where?) in the world are you even talking about?
One of the silver linings of a subscription model is that you're able to stop paying and move when it's no longer interesting, here you're asked to invest in a platform that can be taken from you.
Are they really? You will "own" digital licenses to the games, but you will not have any way to play them once you stop paying for the subscription.
That doesn't feel like "ownership" to me...
You often cannot run even single player games without having connected to Steam (no need for account to be locked for this, but requires connectivity for one).
Multiplayer games almost always require Steam these days.
I used Steam as an example but applies to other platforms as well.
So yeah, I would say you pay for the license only, and you do not own the games at all, not anymore, and this has been true for a long time now.
They're not yours. Can you resell and recoup? Nope, digital licenses.
Can you buy a 2k computer and play them? You can't or won't, that's the whole reason you're using this system instead.
So you effectively have 60 bucks per game as a moat to hold you in while they boil the water.
(I wound up building a gaming PC, much more capable but much more than the cost of streaming over an equivalent lifetime - IF streaming services don't enshittify to cost more and deliver less over time, which we all know they will.)
> Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee
That's why people were confused. You made it sound like you couldn't use your hardware to play games. Why are you streaming from cloud PCs in the first place if you have the hardware?
I get that it was free before as part of a subscription, but now GPU's are more expensive. Nothing that you paid for up-front is being taken away. The subscription plans just changed is all.
Because they're trying to push a specific narrative.
well, unless you want to play some peer to peer multiplayer, then there is a sub you need to pay
It is a step towards normalization of anti-consumer habits.
Xbox Cloud Gaming gives you 50 hours for $12. You could game for 3333 hours to equal the Xbox Series X in price ($800). Say you want to depreciate the device over 7 years, that's about 500 hours of gaming a year, or ~9-10 hours a week.
I'd say that's a pretty reasonable limit for a low volume, casual gamer.
Half of all Americans watch more…..
To imply it being somewhat controversial, so people jump in and generate clicks.
It is not unexpected to pay 30p/kWh, which if you have a 500W graphics card is 15p/hr to play a AAA videogame, in graphics card cost alone. This ignores you will also be thrashing your CPU, which is maybe another 125W.
This is still a premium over that, but you don't need to buy the graphics card in the first place, so it's pretty understandable.
A more realistic number is 400-500W total power for the whole PC including the monitor. If a typical UK gamer spends 3 hours gaming every single day (or averages that, so 20 hours a week), they will add... £150 to their energy bills.
Lets compare that with two loads of laundry & tumble drying per week on eco mode (2 * 3.5kwh * £0.30 * 52) which is £110
or using a dishwasher twice a week: £40
It is not very much. And it's not subject to random licensing bait&switch, data center input lag, doesn't require the expensive monthly internet charges for the faster fiber tiers because you're streaming video data constantly, and you also have a PC to do with as you wish.
People are right to have an instinctive, emotional revulsion to game streaming. You can run the numbers and find a rational revulsion also.
They are also irrelevant? I'm not really sure what point you're making?
I think game streaming is fine. You're still buy the games, you can still play them locally. I really don't see the issue. The Stadia model was bad, sure, but "rent out a gfx card over the network" is not something I think is worth ruffling your feathers over.
Correct, that is why the "to stream games you bought" qualifier exists in the title :)
They want to eliminate that. AIs will open source their games otherwise.
AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.
But pirates have historically done a pretty good job without AI.
Existing trends towards games with required online components, subscription-based content and microtransactions will no doubt continue, of course.
Not streaming, other than as an extra-cost option, because the margins on subscriptions and microtransactions are bound to be orders of magnitude higher while providing more value to the majority of players.
AIs should be able to use the same clean room reverse engineering techniques humans use in order to produce a legally clean open source game engine that can use the original game's copyrighted assets.
LLMs are created through mass ingestion of data, and so, by definition, cannot be a clean room. They are trained on the things that they're tasked with copying.
I'm afraid, the companies in question, have been more than happy to ingest pirated material.
A clean-room implementation is going to be much, much more effort than a "decompilation". Even a decompilation is, I think, more than the hype is claiming. You can't just point at a game, say "decompile it and make it work on Windows" and get a result in one shot. It will take playtesting, cycling around, QA, and time to polish it up. But that will still itself be much easier than an actual clean room implementation. Let alone getting sued by the owner anyhow and having to prove it was clean room in a typical chaotic individual dev environment.
This is legally safe because the spec only described interfaces and had no copyrighted code from the original app. APIs are fair use under Google v Oracle and code that accidentally ends up the same falls under merger doctrine.
They can maybe try and get you on patents but that's easy to avoid by doing it in Europe. Trade secrets don't apply because you reverse engineered the code. The only thing left is good old section 1201.
Of course it's different in practice because these companies have huge legal teams and know where the corpo friendly or tech illiterate judges work. But that's a separate question from is it legal or not.
The pipeline begins with decompilation. Maybe it doesn't save all that information, but it is part of the pipeline, and so, will be part of the consideration when discovery happens.
Fixing this requires the end of free personal computing as we know it today. Every computer must become a walled garden. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for must be destroyed.
And the game industry has continued to grow in spite of rampant piracy for decades, so there's not much to change here other than a slight reduction in the value of console exclusives if they can be easily vibe ported to PC (but the majority of players will play them on console anyway, as is the case with current console platforms that are easily emulated like Switch).
So at most, vibe ports will marginally lower the value of platform exclusives, and lead to fewer exclusives and/or shorter exclusivity periods.
I, for one, have no problem with this outcome.
I feel GTA 6 will be the last mainline GTA that we run on our local systems.
What actually limits someone from doing this?
1) You need the hardware to play the games, still. You still need a good enough PC or a console like a PS5 to play all these emulated/cross-compiled games. Though, the cost is moderate these days: a used PS5 goes for $400-500?
2) You need to want to jailbreak your console, giving up "mainstream" features (multiplayer, warranty). This requires some interest and know-how, too. Though the jailbreak steps are easy these days.
3) If you lack a console, your PC needs to be strong enough to play WASM or emulated/cross-compiled games. I suppose for consoles like the Switch, that aren't super powerful, most PCs made the past few years could play a AAA Zelda game in the browser. But playing on PC is often not as fun as on a console, with the couch and controller and all.
I have a hard time people en masse want to give up multiplayer, by jailbreaking their consoles.
But single-player games are probably going to have a harder time.
The video game world is already super top heavy, with mass-market multi-player games (like Valorant), not to mention casino-like gacha games. So the trends may further favor this current track.
Fully homomorphic encrypted processing may also become a norm and if that is combined with some games going back to being console only, there could be significant enough protection for games that contain trade secrets. That said, the days may be numbered for trade secrets at all given that better models may make today's clever trade secrets look juvenile.
At the same time, a lot of these games were already getting decompiled and inspected at runtime. That has historically been one part of the incentive to release games on console only or console first, particularly first party titles.
In any market where it's relevant to their business interests, they can still rely on the copyright laws and can set traps for any companies using decompiled code as part of their own paid and sold product. That whole process will become cheaper and easier to do as well, plus new approaches to slowing down or hindering the results of decompilation will become normal for games in mathematically provable ways. We've already seen approaches over the years like Denuvo.
Always online games themselves have benefited from some of their code being in the cloud and that will obviously be under fire more than ever with people writing their own servers, but even that might have novel approaches that can survive advanced tampering.
But also AI can just recreate games from gameplay videos.
Or for long.
Well… yeah. Or you can assemble it yourself for free if you prefer.
Looked for a real console and discovered all small shops and big box chains offer Nintendo and PS, none have Xbox. Speaking with managers revealed they or their suppliers "lost" or "ended" contracts to carry it.
Secondary market / used was dirt cheap – good condition consoles for less than a new controller: €35 for Xbox One S, €85 for Xbox Series S.
Smelled like a death spiral well underway.
Edit: Looks like Rockstar did the guy a favour and it was 6000 hours (https://www.nme.com/news/red-dead-redemption-2-stadia-player...)
This is from 2019: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/stadia-launch-dev-the...
That is already a thing in NVidia Now, why would Xbox do it differently?
[0]: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
I got into Xbox and Game Pass a few years ago to catch up on titles like Halo , Gears, Forza Horizon etc that I never had a chance to play. I still can’t believe that I can play thousands of games going back 20+ years.
it’s Willy Wonka’s Game Factory and people are still moaning!
Now, this feels fine with <10ms input latency over wifi. Even in 2026 I'm skeptical about sending my input to Atlanta and back.
Of course you don't need 2x teslas just to stream a game to your living room - a relatively power-efficient streaming box is possible
On top of that, the Steam App is a bit janky, so much so that I just hauled my gaming rig out, plugged it directly into the TV, set Steam to launch at start-up in Big Picture Mode and bam, good to go.
Can't wait for the Steam Machine though...
-wake up feeling sick after a late night of playing video games
-excited to play some halo 2k19
-"xbox on"
-...
-"XBOX ON"
-"Please verify that you are "annon332" by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
-"Doritos™ Dew™ it right"
-"ERROR! Please drink a verification can"
-reach into my Doritos™ Mountain Dew™ Halo 2k19™ War Chest
-only a few cans left, needed to verify 14 times last night
-still feeling sick from the 14
-force it down and grumble out "mmmm that really hit the spot"
-xbox does nothing
-i attempt to smile
-"Connecting to verification server"
-...
-"Verification complete!"
-finally
-boot up halo 2k19
-finding multiplayer match...
-"ERROR! User attempting to steal online gameplay!"
-my mother just walked in the room
-"Adding another user to your pass, this will be charged to your credit card. Do you accept?"
-"NO!"
-"Console entering lock state!" Nueva Yo -"to unlock drink verification can"
-last can
-"WARNING, OUT OF VERIFICATION CANS, an order has been shipped and charged to your credit card"
-drink half the can, oh god im going to be sick
-pour the last half out the window
-"PIRACY DETECTED! PLEASE COMPLETE THIS ADVERTISEMENT TO CONTINUE"
-the mountain dew ad plays
-i have to dance for it
-feeling so sick
-makes me sing along
-dancing and singing
-"mountain dew is for me and you"
-throw up on my self
-throw up on my tv and entertainment system
-router shorts
-"ERROR NO CONNECTION! XBOX SHUTTING OFF"
-"PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE"
But what I am definitely afraid of is that they will want to charge games per hour anyway. The talks that consoles will cost 2000 USD is part of it. They don't want you to own things anymore.
You can't buy a house anymore, because they rather buy and keep it to create shortages and make you pay an absurd rent.
We should be talking more about how taxes should fit into this world where they are positioning themselves to not allow people to have things, not even the basic.
For examples, in the housing thing, it should not only have higher taxes for keeping properties empty but also it should be exponential otherwise it will become a cost to people. Making it exponential make it unviable. Also, investment funds should be much more regulated and should require approval for every transaction above a threshold (which imo should be small to close loopholes). This will slow things down enough.
The demand will still exist but companies will fill the gap. We should not be relying on one single investment fund to control your health, housing and employment.
We also should be discussing on closing all the gaps that ultra rich are using to not contribute back to the system they explore. They became leeches/parasites and not putting back the amount they should is causing them to be able to break the system more and more.
The only Pacific way right now is to boy;cott these big fellas. They got to comfortable saying that we are trash and the blame of everything is on us while doing everything they can to not even pay basic rights to employees.
I also think that if you know a trillionaire employee with a white collar, they also should get bit more pressure.
I know someone working in a company which recently caused hundreds of "collateral" deaths, and for him and everyone in the company, it is not their fault they exploded innocent people. We need to put these folks back to reality, because they are the same type of trash as we are, and they don't know it.
Now I guess it is obvious why they have been building so many bunkers lately. They were definitely conspiring.
(Btw, I have a strong feeling that sxai+t might become an investment fund with several companies, but that's another conversation)
And I am using the word conservative in the non-political sense here - opposed to change. The individual motivations are many, but ultimately, a lot of people tend to avoid change around where they live.
In most cities it's developers who are pushing councils/government to rezone land so they can secure additional development sites.
So Ireland made it almost literally illegal to build anything and it sounds like that led to bad behavior? Yes Ireland should fix corruption around building but they should also allow people to build homes.
[1]. https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/a-zoning-system-for-e...
The price seems a little high, as I expect them to be before tax and currency conversion, but mostly I struggle to see who this is for.
https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/games-apps/cloud-gaming/...
If you're out, on vacation or something, then sure streaming to your phone or tablet makes sense, but you're not going to sign in to a random Smart TV or PC with your Xbox account (at least Microsoft shouldn't encourage that behaviour). That just seems like such a limited use case to me.
"XBOX Game Pass Ultimate" gives you fifteen hours per month of "cloud playtime" for 23 USD per month. "XBOX Game Pass Essential" gives you five hours per month for 10 USD per month. [0][1] You are currently unable to buy more hours (or play for "free" by watching adverts!) unless you are an "XBOX Insider"... [2][5] but, let's assume that what's in the AT article is what "XBOX Insiders" are paying.
So, uh, this seems like -as the kids say- dogwater for "your average gamer who games 10-12 hours a week". Unless I've fucked up my math, for your forty hours of play time, you're paying between 22 USD (with an "Essential) subscription and 31 USD (with an "Ultimate" subscription) per month.
You're paying 260->370 USD per year for the ability to stream the games. If you buy your consoles used, [3] you're paying enough to buy one or two mid-end XBOXes or ~three low-end XBOXes every year. [3] If we go back to new prices in that distant year of 2025, [4] you're still buying an entire XBOX every year just for the privilege of being able to play video games for a handful of hours on Saturdays and Sundays.
Like the kids say... that's cheeks, bro.
[0] <https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/compare>
[1] <https://www.xbox.com/en-US/cloud-gaming#join>
[2] <https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/games-apps/cloud-gaming/...>
[3] <https://www.gamestop.com/consoles-hardware/xbox-one/consoles>
[4] <https://web.archive.org/web/20250118085114/https://www.neweg...>
[5] Given that that "free" tier exists, no points shall be awarded to those who are able to predict what XBOX "cloud playtime" pricing trends are gonna look like over the next year or so... it's like dynamiting fish in a barrel.
All the other games I play are 20+ years old and I play in a windows VM.
Play old games, emulate, or better yet, take a walk or read books. The industry hates you and wants to waste all of your money.
You can link most Bluetooth controllers to your fire TV stick, or chrome browser and stream games.
Hogwarts Legacy is included in standard Amazon Prime and worth playing if you want some casual fantasy open world gaming.
It's crazy that after all this time, there still isn't anything that is better than it.
But we've got 4-5 decades of games to enjoy.
Part of the reason that the games industry is struggling is that there's been no real generational leaps for a long time. Gaming used to be driven by those technological leaps, but these days we just get incremental improvements. 10-15yr old games are just as entertaining as brand new releases and often don't look too dated.
Also, ever more people are getting into retro gaming, enjoying the classics from the 80s and 90s, from well before microtransactions and hyper-competitive online multiplayer.
I've had better luck finding great games I didn't know about from the 1990s than from the past twenty years.
If you like 2d platforming exploration types, try Hollowknight, Celeste, VVVVVV, Ori, Animal Well. Each one is fantastic.
So far, only Rusted Moss and Silksong were worth my time among the platformers I tried, which included the original Hollow Knight (platforming is too easy), Celeste (too easy A-sides, unfun B-sides) and Animal Well (too easy base game, too cryptic post game).
Piracy has been present since the advent of the personal computer and I think it's accepted by most that some people will pay, and others just won't. I'm not sure that AI reverse engineering changes this picture.
I think both, I would argue that right now, giving hardware into the hands of your customer presents a much bigger risk nowadays. Streaming is obviously the better option for margins, and now it is basically the only option to keep the product under control. Also now that consumer GPU/memory is getting more and more expensive, I think it has become realistically the only way forward.
Given they're moving to digital-only future I fully expect them to sell a "50$ + monthly subscription" dongle-like version of ps6 and xbox where you can play the game you buy as a streaming solution, or pay the aforementioned price for a "locally hosted" device on a console.
And I'm not sure we're ever going to see cheap RAM or GPUs again. There's clearly more money to be made at current price levels, and not much potential for competition to fix the market.
Why did you have to phrase it like this, instead of just bringing up your own counterpoint?
Also, I'd see the concern here as where the code runs: if there is a dependency on the server to pull down code/assets, but it still runs it locally, then there is still an opportunity to pirate it locally - So this isn't a point about cloud-dependence, but AI/piracy specifically pushing execution to the server side.
What does this have to do with this? I'm not sure you understand the point being made..
>What does this have to do with this? I'm not sure you understand the point being made..
Chris, buddy. We probably should not talk on this platform again. Have a great day!
MS is charging you 24 to 40 cent to rent a GPU so you can play without having to buy hardware, they aren't charging you to play your game on your own hardware.
The problem is that this is the entry point to do more nefarious things later
Companies love to boil the frog - introduce something and later jack up the price or take something else away or something like that
I at least am always weary of new stuff like this
The divide between those that can own their own consoles and those that are forced to feed the cloud quarter-by-quarter like an old-timey arcade is widening, and this sucks.
But after 4 years you still have your own console that you can sell.
I know my N64 has more than 5000 hours on it, and I'm fairly certain it'll still be in working condition when I die.
/s/cloud/rentseekers/
Ultimately, you end up paying for the usage somehow.
https://partner.steamgames.com/pccafe
even though phones have 1080p resolutions, the pixel density is so high you could get away with the more minute detail that would be obvious on a 24' screen.
currently Xbox games are made to be played on regular monitors the devs are optimizing for that.
Reminds me of the enshittttification of TV where every new system starts off ad free and then adds ads anyways.
and I don't actually think that's substantially different from other competitors, like geforce now
whether I will choose to play it on a different server in the first place is a different question (I won't)
It's hard though not to see the writing on the wall in regards to "local compute GPU availability". Every single industry even tangentially related to compute power has "silently" moved their bus model to consumption based, despite the consumer base having 0 appetite for that. (We're not engineers/app developers who are forced to use LLM agents, we're trying to pay a service that hosts games.)
I am unsure how a medium that was a failure as a free/subscription model will succeed as a floating pay-as-you-go model.
It’s just a bummer that this process wasn’t a bit easier. I recall there was some setup involved.
How often do you buy new computers? I paid something like 2500 USD for my Threadripper machine (including 128 GB of RAM and graphics card) ~seven years ago. Between now and then I paid ~580 USD (at the end of last year) to get a new graphics card and that's it. After last year's upgrade, I've yet to run into a game that it doesn't play reasonably, and I've also gotten a lot of work done with it over all the years I've had it.
The console lifecycles being like a decade long has been a fantastic blessing for us PC gamers. Most AAA games are intended to run well on those ancient almost-PCs, which means that our old actually-PCs usually play the games just fine.
It's a positive in the sense that due to these industry changes (computer power going up 20x in cost.), the platforms are offering a way to let us peons play games.
It's a negative in that it's a futher commitment of these vendors to hoarde compute/GPU power from western consumers and chinese LLM vendors. MS will routinely purchase the highest end GPU for sake of keeping this service alive, nevermind their own LLM. Good luck getting one yourself.
I'm not so certain the average gamer is well-informed enough to realize what they're giving up, or that they feel strongly enough to take a stand for it if they do. I'm hopeful they will, we'll see.
Game pass always has been a scam [0] for years and now here we have the ghost of Stadia in Xbox services as streaming games make it into non subscribers.
You will still own nothing, stream everything and be very happy when the game is simulated with a world model.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33362792
They have failed at that service business several times over decades, and continue re-discovering customers don't like the sales model.
Someone has to pay for the over-provisioned data-center boondoggle, but note classic board games and cards are still fun. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtP39b5goxc
The nickle and dime tax.
I mean I would never stream a game, but still
I advocated so much against it. I was so sad when I saw that virtually nobody cared. It seems games are more important than freedom.
If you want true freedom, you should follow Richard Stallman.
There is a problem though: he talks about software freedom, not computer freedom.
Right now we can make free software ourselves and enjoy the freedom that brings, but the war on general purpose computing rages on and it threatens to invalidate all of our efforts. Free software is completely pointless if our computers start refusing to run it.
We need to enshrine computer freedom into law and literally ban stuff like remote attestation. We also need distributed computer manufacturing technology so that normal people can simply create their own free computers at home just like they can create free software at home.
If you want to see what happens when you compromise on this, all you have to do is look at mobile operating systems. They're all owned by corporations and governments, and it's enforced by hardware remote attestation. Install a custom system where you're in control? Attestation fails. You're banned from everything, you get no service anywhere, you are ostracized from digital society, you become a second class citizen. Mark my words: one day we will need remote attestation just to connect to the internet.
Not everyone plays online games, but most people need communications apps, banking apps, government apps. Our "free distros" will be nothing but paperweights soon if we don't find a way literally outlaw remote attestation. I think people are really underestimating what's truly at stake here.
I say this as someone who plays games that are significantly aided by remote-attestation-based anticheat: it's a beachhead that we will regret ceding.
It also doesn't really matter if they have kernel stuff or not, unless you game on a different user a user space process can already read all your files and even memory of your processes.
The computers are ours. We are the gods of our digital realms. Their software is running under our control. This "take it or leave it" nonsense doesn't really fly. Adversarial interoperability means there's any number of options available to us.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
The notion that people would willingly give up this godlike power just to play online video games without cheaters is one of the saddest ideas I've ever come across. Gamers would reduce our personal computers to consoles without a shred of guilt. I barely have words to express how I feel about that.
Not a problem. It's their computer, they can edit the game's memory to freeze their character's hitpoints or look through walls if they really want to. As the owners of the machine, it's their god given right.
> People are breaking the social contract of competitive games.
This is not even remotely close to being worth sacrificing our freedom and leverage over. Let it happen. Play with friends you know and trust instead of internet randoms.
> Booting into a special environment just for competitive games would allow both to coexist.
There will never be such a "special environment" for games. Every government and corporation under the sun wants this for much more sinister reasons. The notion that this will be limited to video games is laughable. Video game are merely how they are selling this subversion to you.
Either your computer is yours or it's not. And if your computer allows strangers to set up an untouchable embassy within your system where they can do anything they want and remain forever beyond your reach, then it's not really your computer, is it? It's the corporation's computer, they're just generously allowing you to use it... Provided you follow their silly policies and rules.
The abuses that will materialize if we allow them to get away with this nonsense will put science fiction to shame.
This is happening irregardless of what your wants are. Booting into a self contained game image allows both to co exist, rather than Epic and such locking down normal distros.
Coexist? That's total nonsense. This is merely a temporary solution for them. The end game is the total destruction of computing freedom as we know it today. Video games are just the first thing they will take away from you. They also want your encryption, your local AIs, your torrents, your adblockers, your emulators, anything and everything that harms their bottom line and subverts their laws in any way.
Soon you will no longer be allowed to boot into anything that will give you any form of control. It's the war on general purpose computing, cheating in online games is completely irrelevant next to that. The democratization of cryptography allows citizens to defeat police, judges, even literal spies. Computers are too subversive to allow us citizens to own them, they think we should only have computers that run a restricted set of government signed executables. It's the end of everything the word "hacker" ever stood for.
What makes it especially hilarious in a sad way is the fact that this is what makes personal computers truly special. Consoles are just locked down computers, we're the ones who have freedom. Considerable effort is spent on jailbreaking consoles precisely to restore that freedom. Yet the PC gamers seem to be almost eager to "coexist" with these hostile corporations whose entire mission is to reduce our computers to appliances.
That's not a thing on the default config of any mainstream distro I'm aware of; everyone restricts attaching a debugger and similar to root by default these days.
But AC is kinda useless on Linux anyway, might as well have none.
Previously https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/epic-games-launcher-pr...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50088762
The entire point is to lock down a user's linux install so that they can't interfere with the anticheat.
It probably isn't far off where AAA games are only available via streaming simply because not enough people are willing to buy $1500 consoles and $100+ games.
As for Valve itself, many probably won't find Valve that great when the new management generation takes over, and is no longer Gabe calling the shots.
Love my steam deck, but the dock/handheld experience isn’t as seamless as switch and flipping from desktop to gaming mode had a like 15% chance of freezing the device until maybe 18-24mo ago. There was also that update issue for years if you left your home network.
Xbox/Switch/Playstation are incredibly reliable and turnkey (and until recently, a low upfront cost). It’s why people turned to them by the millions.
The problem was never the hardware. Consoles and PCs were both a compromise, a trade between convenience, flexibility, price. The easy to use devices from Steam are more console than PC and that's fine. Nobody has a problem with this as long as games run. If the game runs well I don't care about the CPU, RAM, OS, or that I can't upgrade them. I don't spend money on RAM for the sake of plugging things in, I spend it because the system needs it. The Steam Machine is a step towards "consolification" from a PC perspective. The Deck is a true console. So saying "finally consoles are gone" should be more "consoles are dead, long live consoles".
The big problem that only recently got prominence is ownership of the games. Take away the brand loyalty and you'll see that Steam isn't really doing much here. But I care about being able to buy and sell my games, or play them for as long as a compatible system is available. In this regard the Steam store is not much different from console stores. It offers some quality of life features but the core is still missing. It's not my game anymore and this comes with a lot of implications that aren't mitigated by running Linux or having RAM slots.
That entire paragraph makes it obvious that I'm talking about hardware. From the first sentence that spells it out, to talking about upgrading RAM. On the software front, the "open" PC ecosystem is heading in a bad direction for consumers too. So what if I can install from any store if they all rent me the same game at the same price? The difference between Valve and Epic is that one has a loyal following of promoters but in the end I don't own the game, I'm only renting it. And we're always one step away from rentseeking and or losing access even to those rentals.
i mean, it sounds like it's a subscription plan and some extra session passes added on, not like you actually bought a game at any point, correct me if i'm wrong
That means most of the average Xbox user's library is not supported, and if you're paying for Game Pass you almost definitely have a physical Xbox that can stream any game you have installed for free.
This has zero value for players. Streaming can have two business models - you pay a subscription to stream games you already own outside the platform like GeForce Now, or buy on the platform and stream for free like Stadia.
Xbox is charging per hour and making players buy games they already own through Game Pass.
You need to drill a hole into a concrete wall once - you rent the drill. You spend every day drilling countless holes - you buy the drill.
in this case, you're clearly not allocating a device for your sole usage for a given period of time; it's a gaming SAAS, which isn't really renting
I'm unhappy that the Kinect got removed from the Xbox and with this sort of nonsense, I won't be purchasing any sort of replacement from Microsoft.
Anyway...