Xbox is introducing strict monthly time limits for Game Pass subscribers who stream games online through its cloud gaming service.

The changes, which come into effect in November, will see a subscriber to the £16.99 Ultimate monthly plan able to stream games for up to 15 hours a month – before having to purchase additional cloud play time.

Xbox said the limits were due to the rising cost of cloud gaming, and they would allow the firm to “continue to invest” in the service’s “reliability and performance”.

While some questioned, external whether the service was used by many to begin with, others called out, external the additional limits for subscribers.

Cloud gaming allows players to stream and play games online from a remote server using a phone, tablet or controller, rather than downloading and running it on a PC or console at home.

Different tiers of subscription to Game Pass will have different limits.

Premium users will get 10 hours, while those on the basic Essential tier will get five hours a month before they have to pay for extra time.

Xbox claimed just 4% of the people who use Games Pass – its Netflix-style subscription plan for games – use its cloud gaming service.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, external reported Game Pass has 30 million subscribers, which would leave the number of people affected by the cloud gaming changes at roughly 1.2 million.

“This is a pretty awful change, hopefully Xbox adds an extra zero on the end cause 15hrs is abysmal. 30 minutes a day, really?” posted one commenter on X, external.

Jez Corden of Windows Central told the BBC the announcement showed that “absolutely nothing is safe from the AI-driven component crisis,” but he added it also highlighted “where Microsoft’s priorities are”.

Both cloud gaming and AI use the same infrastructure – data centres – to process information.

“For them to continue to offer unlimited access to Microsoft Copilot [AI] for free but restrict paid cloud gaming in this way shows some contradiction,” he added.

Xbox said in a blog post, external that from November, users would also be able to use the company’s cloud gaming feature without subscribing to Game Pass, but by buying “cloud playtime hours” through the Xbox store.

It has not revealed how much extra hours of cloud gaming would cost.

The news comes as Asha Sharma, Xbox’s chief executive, told the BBC in an exclusive recent interview that the company and the industry as a whole needed to “start to innovate on affordability and efficiency,” amid a “crisis” in computing prices.

“As an industry, we’re in the middle of ‘Rampocalypse’. We’re in the middle of people coming back from Covid and the patterns changing,” she said.

“Rampocalypse” refers to the fact that the cost of a previously cheap hardware component, random access memory (Ram), has shot up in price with the expansion of compute-hungry data centres. Some people also call it “Ramageddon”.

Sharma added: “Within Xbox, we haven’t been healthy. And so a lot of the reset that will take us throughout the year is really meant to help ensure that we are here for the next 25 years and we’re continuing to serve our purpose and our mission.”

According to Xbox owner Microsoft’s July financial filings, external, annual Xbox revenue dropped by $1.7bn to roughly $21.8bn (£16.1bn) – a 7% decline from 2025.

Part of Sharma’s reset has seen 3,200 people let go at the company – with 1,600 job losses announced in July, and the remaining posts to go gradually over the course of Microsoft’s 2027 financial year.

Studios which had been acquired by Xbox – including Compulsion Games, which made the Bafta-winning South of Midnight and Double Fine Productions, makers of Psychonauts – were also made independent again.

Sharma is betting these changes can reverse its fortunes despite concerns over its subscription strategy and rising AI-related costs.

“Sometimes you have to restructure a business when it’s not doing well, and that was true with our Xbox business,” Microsoft’s president Brad Smith recently told the BBC.

In an interview in July, Jeff Gattiss, Amazon’s head of gaming, told the BBC he believed the rising cost of tech would mean people will turn to streaming games online rather than buying new consoles.

However, despite some big names investing in the technology, it has never fully reached the mainstream.

Google launched its own cloud gaming service Stadia in November 2019, positioning it as a “Netflix for games”.

The service was discontinued in January 2023, external after the company said it had not attracted as many users as hoped.

For many gamers, cloud gaming remains too unreliable for regular use due to its reliance on high-speed internet – and an additional fee may further limit its appeal.

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