Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents an hour to stream games you’ve already purchased

In September, when Microsoft significantly limited the game streaming buffet available to Game Pass subscribers, the company said that non-subscribers would soon be able to “purchase cloud gaming hours through the Xbox Store and stream eligible games they own on supported devices.” Today, Microsoft rolled out these a la carte Cloud Playtime purchases to Xbox Insiders, with prices that might be a little maddening for gamers who have already purchased these games via streaming.

The “introductory price” for Xbox Cloud Playtime purchases is as follows:

• 10 hours for $4 (~$0.40/hour)
• 25 hours for $8 (~$0.32/hour)
• 50 hours for $12 (~$0.24/hour)

Purchased game time “remains available until used,” Microsoft writes, so you don’t have to worry about your 50-hour purchase expiring before you can use it fully.

Paying directly for playing time in this way conjures up images of old arcades, where players would invest a quarter or two (in 20th century dollars) often for just a few minutes of play. This type of metered play has largely fallen out of fashion, however, in favor of one-time purchases for an all-you-can-eat gaming experience at home.

At first glance, paying as little as 24 cents for an hour of streaming gameplay doesn’t seem completely unreasonable. Remember, though, that these streaming costs come up of what you paid to buy the game in the first place. Unlike an Xbox Game Pass subscription, which includes a few hours of monthly streaming access to hundreds of games as part of the subscription price, these Cloud Playtime packs “require the purchase of cloud-playable games or, for some games, free access,” Microsoft writes.

Say what you want about the old arcade model, but you didn’t need to buy the cabinet and SO pay a quarter per game.

Keep the meter running

The Cloud Playtime packs measured by Microsoft differ from Google’s failed Stadia streaming experiment, which offered unlimited streaming playtime across devices for games you purchased on the platform. Of course, Stadia game purchases also didn’t let you download games to play locally on a PC or console, making the overall value proposition quite different. This was especially true after the shutdown of Stadia in 2022 made these purchases unplayable (although Google offered a full refund for all Stadia purchases at this point).