By Nelson Schneider - 09/20/26 at 01:01 PM CT
If you’re a Millennial or Zoomer, you’ve probably never heard of metered billing. Thanks to commodities of scale and a race to the bottom among corporate competitors, nearly all of the Web 3.0 subscription services have been “all you can eat” deals,where you pay a flat fee each month and can use the service as much as you want.
For those of us older than Pepperidge Farms... well we DO remember metered billing for everything, including stuff that nobody would even think about metering now, like long-distance phone calls. What were long-distance phone calls? Any phone call made to a number outside of your local 3-digit prefix. If I wanted to call home from school during the day, I had to get permission from the principal in order to make a long-distance call on the school’s dime. Even worse, if my Troll Dad wanted to talk to his Even Trollier Mother, he had to pay long-distance fees... by the MINUTE.
Well, our favorite punching bag, Microsoft’s XBOX Games Division, is bringing that sort of scarcity-driven market back into relevance with upcoming changes to Gamepass’ streaming feature. If you didn’t know – and I didn’t, because I don’t care about Gamepass and wouldn’t subscribe to it under any circumstances – XBOX offers the ability to stream games off of their servers to an Xbox Series console without actually going through the effort of downloading the game (making Gamepass look even more like a tasting service to rapidly pick through a huge pile of garbage in search of something of any value) or running it locally on the Xbox Series hardware. It turns out that, in spite of their efforts to grow their so-called Cloud Gaming service, it made up only a tiny percentage of total Gamepass playtime.
However, that tiny percentage did, according to XBOX’s own numbers, increase 45% last year, leading to more server costs and, naturally, more enshittification. Moving forward, Gamepass subscribers will only have a limited number of hours of Cloud Gaming available each month without paying extra. Depending on a subscriber’s Gamepass tier, they can expect to have a cap of 15, 10, or 5 hours per month of streaming before XBOX shuts them down. And the even crazier thing is that, in spite of Gamepass Cloud Gaming shaking out to somewhere between $1.50 and $2.00 per hour, there is currently no announced method of buying more time... but if enshittification continues to work as we already know it does, we’ll end up like an old-school cell phone data plan where each additional hour of Cloud costs significantly more than the hours in the base subscription package.
It just goes to show that every single one of the console companies is trying as hard as possible to make their products unusably bad and capture a customer base that doesn’t have any other options.
