Xbox said Thursday it will impose monthly cloud gaming time limits on Game Pass subscribers beginning in November, ending years of unlimited access. Players who go over their limit can buy more time.
The caps vary by subscription tier. The 15-hour allotment goes to Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, whose $22.99 monthly plan sits at the top of the tier structure. The mid-tier Game Pass Premium plan, at $14.99 a month, comes with 10 hours, and the entry-level Game Pass Essential plan at $9.99 carries a 5-hour cap. Xbox did not specify what additional hours will cost.
"We're introducing this model because the cost of providing cloud gaming grows as more people use it and play for longer," Xbox said in a blog post. "Moving to monthly limits allows us to keep offering the service while continuing to invest in its reliability and performance. We understand that for some players the practical result is a higher cost."
Microsoft said the caps will affect a narrow slice of its user base, with just 4% of Game Pass subscribers currently consuming more cloud gaming time each month than the new limits will allow. Xbox also said that non-subscribers could purchase cloud gaming hours to stream titles they already own.
The change is part of a broader shift at Microsoft toward usage-based pricing. Across the company, usage-based billing has become increasingly common, with AI tools like GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot among the products where customers now pay in proportion to their consumption as Microsoft grapples with finite computing capacity.
Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma has been working to reverse declining performance at the gaming division since taking over in February. The hour caps follow a separate move disclosed in July, in which Xbox said it would test ad-supported game streaming.
The subscription service has faced pressure on multiple fronts. Microsoft cut the price of Game Pass Ultimate to $22.99 from $29.99 in April after Sharma flagged the cost as a problem requiring a rethink, while also announcing that future Call of Duty titles would no longer be available on the service at launch. Around the same time, the company reported a roughly 10% year-over-year revenue decline in the gaming division and a 32% slide in hardware sales.
Microsoft then announced the elimination of roughly 20% of Xbox's workforce in July , with Sharma writing in an internal memo that "our business today is not healthy." Game Pass active subscribers stand at around 30 million, well below internal targets, and the division posted a 5% revenue decline in the March quarter.
