Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part? There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware. This pricing is for renting the GPUs, same as GeForce Now and plenty of other services. And it's a pretty solid deal for people who don't want to build a multi-thousand dollar rig for gaming 10-20 hours a week.

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swiftcoder an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Because the model is diverged from the existing model Microsoft established via Game Pass, which made game streaming part of the licensing, not an add-on to purchasing.

Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee to play it on your tablet.

Of course, free game streaming was never a viable business model, so this isn't unexpected, but people aren't going to love the change either way.

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paxy an hour ago | parent [-]

Streaming games from your own Xbox is free. This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".

	▲	swiftcoder 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware". Right, but those people also don't own Xbox games. So this goes from "add-on fee to play the games your already own conveniently", to "buy a $60 game and then pay $/hour to actually play it" Are you saving money in the second scenario vs buying a console? Almost certainly. But it doesn't feel that way to the person paying a big whack upfront and then also stacks of game time.

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matheusmoreira 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.

They want to eliminate that. AIs will open source their games otherwise.

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ahartmetz an hour ago | parent | next [-]

"""Open sourcing""" (this needs maximum scare quotes) games by AI-washing the decompilation is legally just about the same as cracking. You won't be able to deploy the result on a walled garden console and most likely not for for money anywhere, and FOSS people won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.

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matheusmoreira an hour ago | parent [-]

Illegality isn't going to stop anything. It's going to happen regardless.

Fixing this requires the end of free personal computing as we know it today. Every computer must become a walled garden. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for must be destroyed.

	▲	jasomill 44 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sure, but illegality means it's not going to happen commercially. And the game industry has continued to grow in spite of rampant piracy for decades, so there's not much to change here other than a slight reduction in the value of console exclusives if they can be easily vibe ported to PC (but the majority of players will play them on console anyway, as is the case with current console platforms that are easily emulated like Switch).
	▲	ahartmetz an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It is going to happen, but mostly for older games to keep them playable and maybe to get console exclusives to PC. It doesn't make sense to compete with the copied games because it's illegal. It doesn't make sense to "crack" the games like that because one can just crack the original games the usual way (probably with AI support, but that doesn't matter).

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jasomill an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not going to be viable for entire genres of games because latency.

AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.

But pirates have historically done a pretty good job without AI.

Existing trends towards games with required online components, subscription-based content and microtransactions will no doubt continue, of course.

Not streaming, other than as an extra-cost option, because the margins on subscriptions and microtransactions are bound to be orders of magnitude higher while providing more value to the majority of players.

	▲	matheusmoreira an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them. AIs should be able to use the same clean room reverse engineering techniques humans use in order to produce a legally clean open source game engine that can use the original game's copyrighted assets.

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paxy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because games couldn't be pirated before AI?

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matheusmoreira an hour ago | parent [-]

Copyright infringement has always been trivial, but the same couldn't be said about reverse engineering. AIs changed that. The market fot remakes and ports is now threatened. Instead of just waiting ages for some company to port their games to PC, people can just do it themselves.

	▲	jasomill 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		AI or otherwise, porting and QAing a title is orders of magnitude more difficult than downloading a cracked copy of an existing port. So at most, vibe ports will marginally lower the value of platform exclusives, and lead to fewer exclusives and/or shorter exclusivity periods. I, for one, have no problem with this outcome.

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malwrar an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Predicting it now that people will vibecode open source clones built from having bots play the closed game for training data.

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4thguy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part? There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.

Correct, that is why the "to stream games you bought" qualifier exists in the title :)

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phyzix5761 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part?

Because they're trying to push a specific narrative.