this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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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.
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"
This is an important note, the headline grabbed my attention but isn't entirely accurate.
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.
Edit- I'm leaving out things like architecture, shaders, tensor cores, NVIDIA vs AMD, SXM vs PCI-E, etc.
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.
Right but this is cloud gaming on Xbox AND PC. User hardware doesn't matter so you'd only need to make sure it works on the cloud servers which should be allowed to be a heck of a lot more beefy when not restricted to Xbox architecture. Am I off base? I appreciate the insight.
The cloud servers are actually literally Xbox series x's.
Ah. Okay, I get it now. I guess that's easier in the short term for mass production, but I can't imagine that's good for long term support.
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.
Yes, thank you for circling back to the original point.
God what a mountain road that was.
Ah, I may have to clarify that technically Microsoft isn't the AI bro I'm referring to, though they do partake in the insanity. I'm referring to OpenAI specifically. "circular financing" and all that, but Microsoft is more of the hosting provider for OpenAI.