Xbox Cloud gaming is one of the things that made Xbox Game Pass Ultimate a little exciting back when it first launched, if you were ok with paying the monthly subscription fee, but users may be getting it for completely free of charge. That doesn’t mean it won’t have a cost. There’s always a cost. And in this case, that cost is giving up your time for ads. Of course, this probably couldn’t have come at a worse time.

This week, Microsoft announced that it was raising the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $29.99 a month. This is up from its previous price of $19.99 a month. A whole 50% more. That amounts to a whopping $360 a year. Essentially, a dollar a day. Keep in mind, this is twice as much as the original monthly cost of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which was $14.99. Naturally, gamers weren’t happy about this, leading to a seemingly large number of users canceling their Game Pass subscriptions in protest. News of Microsoft’s decision to release an ad-supported cloud gaming option that costs no money might seem like the company’s way of trying to smooth things over.

But that may not be the case. The timing of it all suggests that Microsoft has been planning to launch such an option for a little while now. Regardless of the timing, it’s hard to imagine users forgetting about Microsoft’s double dip into their pockets just because you can now stream games at no cost.

Free Xbox cloud gaming comes with its caveats

Obviously, the big one here is ads. As reported by The Verge, the new option for the cloud gaming feature will include ads that users will have to watch as a trade-off for getting the feature at no monetary cost. Such is the way of things in this day and age, where every other streaming service of any kind seems to have a free, ad-supported option.

There are other caveats, too. The Verge states that this ad-supported model will let you stream some games. This appears to include some games that you own, as well as Xbox Retro Classics and Free Play Days game titles. By the sounds of it, that means a large chunk of the game library that paid cloud gaming users have access to will be left out.

There may be session limits

It’s being reported that Microsoft aims to offer this on handheld devices, consoles, the web, and PC. There’s no mention of mobile device access. Additionally, this free version may have hourly limits. Specifically, one-hour sessions, as well as five free hours a month. One-hour sessions may not sound like a lot. However, Microsoft’s limits may work similarly to how they do on GeForce NOW. Which is to say you may simply have to stop after an hour, then restart a brand-new session. Which would incur another wait time if there was one.
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Source: ndroidheadlines.com