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https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/07/23/game-streaming-ad-supported-xbox-insiders/
Today, we’re starting to test an ad-supported way to stream select games from your library for a limited time, available to XBOX Insiders.
During this test period, XBOX Insiders with an XBOX account will be able to stream games they own for free with ads. Players will have one hour session limits across supported devices and regions.
Here’s what you can expect:
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Ads will play before sessions begin.
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The core game experience is unchanged.
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This is optional. Players can choose other ways to play at any time.
I bought the Xbox x for starfield. Mistakes were made.
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I’ve called this so many times over… It’s not just going to be xbox… it’s going to be PCs in general, With AI data centers raising up the price on all hardware, They are already making moves in the government on banning routers. The plan is going to be for personal computers and hardware to leave the world. Either price them out of consumer reach or flat out outlaw them. We get thin clients like stadia, Luna etc… Actually having a personal computer capable of running software itself will be considered a national security threat. Why wouldn’t you keep your stuff in the cloud where the government can audit it, companies can make sure you aren’t pirating or running unapproved illegal LLMs that could make bombs etc…
Ok, whats your answer for all commercial companies without their own data centers then? You think they’d all be happy to give up their computers/laptops as well, or pay so much higher prices in the future?
“Your company data is safe when using our virtual computers.” *Wink
And you all think all those companies will just fold their cards and go with it? I don’t buy that.
I don’t think it’s going to be an overnight thing, It will start voluntarily, as the price equation shifts. the complications wasn’t worth the savings when office PCs were 1500 a pop, but what about when they are 3000 a pop and projected to hit 5000 next year. After more of them make the switch… then say an announcement can happen that microsoft is lessening it’s support for on prem servers and workstations, patches will be less frequent. and now it’s a risk assessment as well.
Running with thin clients for office workers has been default for large corporations for literally decades. Hell it’s even done in engineering heavy professions too. It’s the entire business model of companies like Citrix, and it’s extremely popular.
As for small(er) businesses, no they’re probably not going to like it, but they hold little to no sway in the matter, so their opinions don’t matter compared to the multi-billion international businesses that fuel this.
And outsourcing IT infrastructure is wildly popular for businesses of all sizes, because it’s less hassle and direct management when you just pay a third party to deal with it.
Oh sweet summer child no it is not. I’ve spent 25+ years in corporate now. Aside from set situations like BCP we are not using thin clients. They’re cumbersome, an absolute bitch to manage, and quite frankly they’re shit (underpowered) and not flexible.
Sure you may get some pockets of orgs that use thin clients across the board but I highly doubt it’s common.
I work in IT for a large healthcare system that runs its EMR (electronic medical record) entirely through Citrix. So yes, yes we are using thin clients. And so is our largest competitor.
Aren’t anecdotes fun, my sweet summer child? You shouldn’t speak with such authority when you have no idea what you’re talking about.
This is the fun thing about The Internet is that neither of us have any idea what we are talking about.
What I can tell you is in finance the use of thin clients is niche and is not a replacement for a laptop/desktop. It’s been tried time and time again.
Yes we virtualize applications using Citrix but again those are niche.
Now, healthcare may or may not be a different beast altogether.
Question, how are users accessing EMR. Are they using a thin client workstation for that along with their word, excel, outlook, etc. or are they logging into a portal from their company issued laptop/desktop?
I’m at a hospital right now and everything here is powered off of laptops hooked up to portable physical workstations.
Regardless, I digress. I don’t give enough of a shit to care further lol.
I can assure you at least one large US bank uses thin clients extensively.
IDK, in broadcast infrastructure it’s thin clients and virtual machines all the way down, and yes it causes tons of problems.
I think you are overestimating just how many big companies use a thin client-like system. But I admit I might be underestimating it. Out of personal experience, I used to work for a pretty big global company and every employee got their own work laptop to use. And that was a company with 30.000+ employees worldwide. So maybe that is my bias in this, and I would think companies like that wouldn’t so easily give up their digital sovereignty.
If they aren’t rich enough, then they are in the same boat as us. This ain’t exactly new… AWS workspaces, Azure Cloud PCs, Google docs, office 365, one drive. The tech has been creeping it’s way into businesses for the last 10 years. Obviously they are getting hammered right now by the raise in prices of new PCs. As the prices go up, they will have to make decisions.
This is exactly what european digital sovereignity is all about
My job trialled azure cloud PCs a couple of years ago.
It was pretty good from my point of view as a user.
However the cost was higher than $8000 laptops we have, so we didn’t adopt it.
Wonder if it’s still the same. Guessing the cloud is still suffering the same hardware price hike anyway.
They can fuck right off…
Microsoft has reinvented the arcade, except this time you buy the game first and then feed the machine quarters to play it. Next up: a premium tier that lets you pause without the meter running. At this rate, Xbox’s most profitable game will be watching customers try to escape the billing screen.
They played too much Roller Coaster Tycoon where they charged an admission fee for the park and then for every single ride too.
Next up: You get a free hour if you watch this AI slop ad. And since we’ve now required eye tracking to be enabled, if you look away from the ad for even a moment, then pay up.
DRINK VERIFICATION CAN
When the joke greentext becomes the torment nexus…
They had to feed the AI something to give the CEO ideas and all the reputable sites cost money so, really, it’s our own fault.
And it’s this kind of shit that has ruined my love for tech. It’s all soulless dystopian slop they want you paying for monthly for the rest of your life. Fuck all these techno dweebs. It’s a shame all the normies will go along with this…
That’s why you ditch consoles, get a PC and buy only from stores that don’t do this rubbish.
Go along? They’ll be zealots demanding everyone get on board, just like heavily exploited console players are today.
They’ll average $1700/year to play the fucking games they already spent $100 to borrow indefinitely? Fuck, gaming sounds so stupid now.
“Indefinitely”, huh? They can just rent it forever? Sounds like a missed opportunity for shareholders, I bet we can get that line even higher
Indefinitely just means unspecified. Could be 3000 years, could be 15 minutes; it implies “until further notice” depending on the whims of the noticer. See “suspended indefinitely” in crime drama shows, where they’re back on payroll by the end of the episode
$1700/yr is 12 hours of gaming each day at $0.40/hr, which is more than the $0.24 you’d actually be paying. Nobody gaming that much would otherwise be spending $100/yr on games in any case.
This is a very stupid thing for the industry, but your numbers are hyperbolic and anti-useful.
Let’s say you play a game that costs 40c to stream, and it’s every day for a year; it will be ~400$
Yeah, and the shit is that it is 0.24 to 0.40, not just 0.24
If you refer to the article, it’s price tiering. You would be consistently paying $0.24.
ah but what about the hardware rental fees
Important point of clarification- this is about streaming from the cloud, using an Xbox or GPU in the cloud to play the game. This makes sense as buying the game or not, you are still using cloud resources.
Xbox Remote Play, which runs the game on your home Xbox and streams from your house to wherever you are, is free.
This is an important note, the headline grabbed my attention but isn’t entirely accurate.
this makes sense
No it doesn’t
Well, what you say does, but running games in the cloud doesn’t make sense in any logical way except for that that the owner of said cloud will be walking to the bank laughing his ass off
Oh I agree paying to rent a cloud xbox when you have one sitting at home is fucking stupid. A lot of cloud everything is fucking stupid, and I say that as an IT person who’s been fighting cloud-itis since the term ‘cloud computing’ became a thing.
I see this as a feature most people wouldn’t actually use.
Only use case I’d have for it is wanting a game to render at higher specs while travelling at like a hotel.
I bought a steam deck for a vacation when it came out. Used it on the flight and that’s it. Never played games except at the airport so I was fine rendering at the steam deck.
Idk, I think you’re immediately jumping to the conclusions of “they’re trying to make us all rent everything”, which, while most likely isn’t wrong, is also obscuring some potential for “Hey look, I can play less-response-time-intensive xbox games on my fricking phone with good wifi, because of amazing compression technology”
Ya at current memory and server gpu prices it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they aren’t even making any money at 40c/hr.
there was something the other day about microsoft having warehouses of GPUs for datacenters that arent even built yet.
They could probably take 1% of those to cover it without any additional costs for them.
They aren’t the same GPUs that are in Xboxs. those are nvidia GPUs eg the nv72 or gb300. There’s no way to make them compatible with Xbox. Source: my unc works at Microsoft data centers.
Why do they need to be compatible with an Xbox? They could just use the PC version for streaming
Xbox and PC versions aren’t exactly 1:1. Plus, those are extremely expensive GPUs to not be selling for top dollar to the AI bros instead.
those GPUs were sold for top dollar to AI bros.
its why microsoft has so many of them, sitting in a warehouse, waiting to be used, for stupid AI bullshit.
They are sitting in the warehouse because there aren’t enough other parts (e.g. DIMMs), power, or data centers for them. And as stupid as AI bullshit is, they are paying more than gamers by orders of magnitude.
Not 1:1 sure, but I’m struggling to think of a meaningful difference that would make the PC version an inferior one besides incompetent porting.
Xbox cloud servers are literally 5 motherboards: 1 management board and 4 Xbox ones. Developers can optimize for a single configuration rather than bake in support for multiple ones. Once it works on an Xbox dev kit, it works on all Xboxs including cloud, console, and handheld. SDKs are making that a thing in the past, but it’s not perfect.
Xbox Developers: Hell yeah! Playstation is shooting themselves in the foot. All we have to do is sit back and we’ll kill it.
Xbox Business : or… hold my beer.
What else do you expect them to do with the billions of dollars of high end data centers they built for copilot? Help humanity in any way?
wanting and getting dont always happen
Iirc One of the previous heads of xbox said that they’re intentionally trying to kill the xbox brand over time by enshittyfying it (or words to that effect).
This might very wel be that. They know damn well this will piss people off.
What is the end goal of killing Xbox? Not having to deal with consoles and just concentrate on computers?
I don’t know. I mean I wouldn’t put it past themto try and merge the whole gaming experience into the Windows ecosystem. We all know what geniuses they are doubling down on the whole slop ridden W11 thing.
This would be so dumb… and at the same time so possible!
Execs totally disconnected from the players base having no damn clue how they’re going to react.
Players are going to be so pissed they’re much less likely to buy anything through MS ever again, but that won’t compute in an exec’s mind.
That sounds like some exec thought it would work. Maybe they saw the success of steam and want a piece of that pie without having to put out hardware? I might be too old to understand, but if that’s the future of console gaming, I don’t want a part of it.
Your playing for cloud computing which as never been free very misleading headline
It’s already part of the monthly fee. They are now tacking on an additional charge. It thought it was pretty clear.
as a paperspace user i read the first part as ‘oh nice’ … then i kept reading. i’ll keep paying 0.76USD/hr. i don’t have time to justify paying for a gaming pc… especially now. so paperspace has been great when i want to play a high end game. my library, mods. but yeah… m$ hell bent on destroying their company for copilot.
>laughs in piracy
Stadia didn’t charge to stream, though I suppose if it still existed it probably would by now.
the most shocking thing about stadia is that they released the means to de-fuck the stadia controller so it could be used as a normal pc controller
even more shocking… it was google
yeah, i should have been more specific, but thats why its so shocking.
