{"id":589589,"date":"2026-09-04T05:18:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T05:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/589589\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T05:18:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T05:18:20","slug":"game-pass-streaming-limits-are-coming-15-hours-a-month-but-you-can-pay-for-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/589589\/","title":{"rendered":"Game Pass streaming limits are coming: 15 hours a month, but you can pay for more"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oh, but don\u2019t worry. If you use up your streaming minutes like you\u2019re talking on a flip phone in 2003, you\u2019ll be able to pay for more, on an hourly basis. Prices for this haven\u2019t been announced yet. <\/p>\n

And Microsoft has helpfully extended this offer to those who don\u2019t subscribe to Game Pass. So I guess that would only make sense if you\u2019ve purchased an Xbox game, that\u2019s available on Game Pass, without subscribing to Game Pass\u2026.but you don\u2019t have anything to play it on. Wow, that is a very small target to hit. <\/p>\n

Microsoft says that this change comes because the service is getting more expensive to run as more people are streaming longer game sessions. (At current levels it says that the limits will impact just 4 percent of users.) But that seems like a pretty hard left turn from the goals of Game Pass streaming for years now. Isn\u2019t all-streaming, all the time pretty much the goal of being able to access your Game Pass subscription everywhere? <\/p>\n

If everything is an Xbox<\/a>, is it only an Xbox for 15 hours a month? Unless you pay more, of course. At that point, it looks a lot like an old arcade machine, where you just keep putting in money if you want to keep playing. Suddenly the best value in gaming is looking like much less bang for the buck. <\/p>\n

Microsoft may not have a choice in this action. It\u2019s laid off thousands of employees, it\u2019s sold or cut off many of the development studios<\/a> it spent the better part of a decade acquiring. It seems like it\u2019s time to pay the piper, and the costs are being passed along to Xbox players.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oh, but don\u2019t worry. If you use up your streaming minutes like you\u2019re talking on a flip phone…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-589589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}