Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents per hour to stream games you already bought

In September, when Microsoft severely limited the game-streaming buffet available to Game Pass subscribers, the company said non-subscribers would soon be able to “purchase cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store and stream eligible games they own on supported devices.” Today, Microsoft rolled out those a la carte Cloud Playtime purchases to Xbox Insiders, with prices that might be a bit galling for players who have already purchased these streamable games.

今年 9 月，当微软大幅限制了 Game Pass 订阅用户可享用的云游戏服务时，该公司曾表示，非订阅用户很快就能“通过 Xbox 商店购买云游戏时长，并在支持的设备上串流游玩他们拥有的符合条件的游戏”。今天，微软向 Xbox Insider 测试人员推出了这些单点购买的云游戏时长服务，但其定价对于那些已经购买了这些可串流游戏的玩家来说，可能会感到有些恼火。

The “introductory launch pricing” for Xbox’s Cloud Playtime purchases is as follows: 10 hours for $4 ($0.40/hour), 25 hours for $8 ($0.32/hour), 50 hours for $8 (~$0.24/hour). Purchased playtime “remains available until it’s used,” Microsoft writes, so you don’t have to worry about your 50-hour purchase expiring before you can use it fully.

Xbox 云游戏时长的“首发推广价”如下：10 小时 4 美元（约合每小时 0.40 美元），25 小时 8 美元（约合每小时 0.32 美元），50 小时 12 美元（约合每小时 0.24 美元）。微软表示，购买的时长“在用完之前一直有效”，因此你不必担心购买的 50 小时时长在用完之前过期。

Paying for playtime directly like this evokes images of old arcades, where players would invest a quarter or two (in 20th century dollars) often for just a few minutes of gameplay. That kind of metered play has fallen heavily out of fashion, though, in favor of one-time purchases for an all-you-can-play experience at home.

这种直接购买游戏时长的模式让人联想到旧时的街机厅，玩家通常需要投入一两枚 25 美分硬币（按 20 世纪的货币价值计算）才能换取几分钟的游戏时间。然而，这种按量计费的模式早已过时，取而代之的是一次性买断即可在家畅玩的游戏体验。

On the surface, paying as low as 24 cents for an hour of streaming game time doesn’t sound completely unreasonable. Remember, though, that these streaming costs come on top of whatever you paid to buy the game in the first place. Unlike an Xbox Game Pass subscription—which includes a few hours of monthly streaming access to hundreds of games as part of the subscription price—these Cloud Playtime packs “require cloud playable game purchase or, for select games, free-to-play access,” Microsoft writes.

从表面上看，支付低至 24 美分来换取一小时的云游戏串流时间听起来并非完全不合理。但请记住，这些串流费用是在你购买游戏本身所支付的费用之外额外收取的。微软指出，与包含每月数小时数百款游戏串流权限的 Xbox Game Pass 订阅不同，这些云游戏时长包“需要购买支持云游戏的游戏，或者对于部分游戏，需要拥有免费游玩的权限”。

Microsoft’s metered Cloud Playtime packs differ from Google’s failed Stadia streaming experiment, which offered unlimited streaming playtime across devices for games you purchased on the platform. Of course, Stadia game purchases also didn’t let you download games for local play on a PC or console, making the overall value proposition quite different.

微软这种按量计费的云游戏时长包与谷歌失败的 Stadia 串流实验不同，后者为你在该平台上购买的游戏提供了跨设备的无限串流时长。当然，Stadia 的游戏购买并不允许你下载游戏到 PC 或主机上进行本地游玩，这使得两者的整体价值主张截然不同。

In the end, it’s a question of how much of a mass market there is for Xbox Cloud Streaming on its own, rather than as an outgrowth of Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. Last month, Microsoft said that only 4 percent of Game Pass subscribers would be affected by the subscription’s new limits of five to 15 hours of streaming playtime per month. That suggests only a small minority of Xbox users want to use cloud streaming for a significant portion of their gaming time, even when it was included as a free perk with their existing subscription.

归根结底，问题在于 Xbox 云游戏作为一项独立服务，而非 Xbox Game Pass 订阅的衍生功能，究竟有多大的大众市场。上个月，微软表示只有 4% 的 Game Pass 订阅用户会受到每月 5 到 15 小时串流时长限制的影响。这表明，即使在云游戏作为现有订阅的免费福利时，也只有极少数 Xbox 用户愿意将其作为游戏时间的主要方式。