With recent reports indicating that a new first-party games-only tier of Game Pass might be on the way, a new rumor indicates that it will also include access to Cloud Gaming, albeit with some caveats. According to Insider Gaming, the Game Pass tier, seemingly codenamed Triton, will allow players access to Cloud Gaming for a limited number of hours per month.
The addition of a time limit on Cloud Gaming shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since services offering the feature, like Nvidia’s GeForce Now, also tend to feature similar limits. Nvidia’s service, for example, gives players 100 hours of gaming per month. Xbox’s Cloud Gaming, on the other hand, has typically featured no such limits.
The decision was likely made as part of new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma’s attempts to make the subscription service more affordable. She had been noted as calling it “too expensive for players” in an internal memo discovered earlier this month.
“Game Pass is central to gaming value on Xbox. It’s also clear that the current model isn’t the final one. Short term, Game Pass has become too expensive for players, so we need a better value equation. Long term, we will evolve Game Pass into a more flexible system, which will take time to test and learn around,” reads the memo.
The tier of Game Pass focused on Xbox Game Studios titles was discovered through datamining efforts last month. The report at the time indicated that it would include games like DOOM 64, Psychonauts, Retro Classics, DOOM Eternal, Dishonored 2, Fable Anniversary, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Gears 5, Halo 5: Guardians, Halo Wars 2, Hellblade, Ori and the Blind Forest, State of Decay 2, and The Elder Scrolls Online. No references to third-party games were discovered in the files.
A report from March indicated that Sharma has been focused on making the subscription service “more enticing to a broader range of customers.” The same report also indicated that Sharma was having discussions with Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters about the potential for a subscription bundle that included the streaming service along with Game Pass.
“You would have to do it in a way that works for the consumer and works for both companies, and frankly, I think Microsoft’s still trying to figure out how to make the Game Pass bundle work for Microsoft,” said Peters at the time. “But what I like about Asha’s thinking is, it’s all about, ‘How do we do more?’ And it’s already been exciting to watch.”
Game Pass got its last major pricing revision back in October, when Microsoft introduced three tiers for the service – Essential, Premium, and Ultimate. While Essential offers over 50 games and costs $9.99 per month, Premium offers more than 200, with a $14.99 per month price tag. Ultimate became quite a bit more expensive, offering over 400 titles for $29.99 per month, along with promises of more than 75 games available through the service on day one of their release.
The price hike had drawn criticism from several people inside and outside of the industry, including original Microsoft Game Studios co-founder Laura Fryer.
