What's next for Xbox Game Pass? Cloud-only tier, exploring ad-based tiers, and the return of the Family Plan?

How the hell would the math on a cloud only tier work? People not buying the hardware lowers their earnings, and every hour someone plays on cloud instead of their own hardware increases their costs. Cloud users are a way worse value proposition than console users before you discount the price.

Microsoft hasn't exactly given us a blow-by-blow breakdown of how much Xbox Cloud Gaming costs to run, but you need only look at other cloud services like Netflix and Spotify to get an idea

This is laughable. Almost all of the scaling those services have managed is because of massive caching to lower the distance data has to travel, with some bonus "high computation for hyper-efficient encoding" scaling. Every user of cloud gaming has to have all the game activity personally calculated and every frame rendered and encoded individually for just them. There's no comparison to video.

Edit: maybe without the library, so it's just a cloud streaming subscription and you have to buy games?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A wealth of promising home-grown titles from the Xbox Games Showcase 2024 back in June gave existing users plenty of reasons to stay subscribed.

Xbox Game Pass has had a really solid July for content, and it'll get even sweeter if the rumors of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 hitting the service soon pan out.

I wrote recently about how games might not be enough to find those elusive "new" users in an article linked below, revolving around the dilemma that the overall number of "core" console players simply isn't growing.

While speaking to developers at shows over the past year, a lot of the discourse revolves around "black hole" games like Fortnite and Roblox, which vacuum up users and turn them into mono-gamers with no interest in playing anything else.

Xbox Game Pass is an attempt to cut through that trend in the name of supporting and showcasing the variety of art the industry has to offer — meeting new customer cohorts halfway.

The vastness of its Activision-Blizzard purchase seems to have led to a lost couple of years of momentum for Xbox as a brand, with attention focused solely on its variety of court cases.

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