7 articlesYou’d thought Xbox Game Pass would show signs of slowing down after its recent price hike. But as it turns out, it has experienced a 45% increase in gaming hours, thanks to cloud gaming.
In a recent post, Microsoft revealed that Xbox cloud gaming with Game Pass is up by 45% compared to the same period last year. At the same time, console players spend 45% more time cloud streaming on their consoles and 24% on other devices.
The major price hike has overshadowed news regarding Xbox Cloud Gaming, which made its way to the lower-tier subscriptions.
If you’re a first-time user, this is actually a price decrease considering how cloud gaming was only exclusive to Ultimate back then. And with cloud gaming becoming available in tiers other than Ultimate, this unsurprisingly led to an increase in usage.
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Also, it has expanded to India, which is home to more than 500 million gamers. This brings the total of countries where Xbox Cloud Gaming is available to 29.
The availability of the service in both Central and South America is one of the contributing factors to cloud gaming’s increased usage. This, alongside its recent release in India.
As far as demographics go, India is by far the 7th largest market in terms of gaming expenditure. There’s also the fact that it’s a mobile and PC-first market.
Microsoft also saw momentum in both Argentina and Brazil, where they claim to have noticed “double digital growth in play time and active players.”
Why Xbox Cloud Gaming is Gaining Popularity
The major price hike in DRAM prices recently means cloud gaming could be a possible solution for gamers who might be struggling to acquire gaming hardware due to ridiculous prices. Even Microsoft’s own Xbox Series X|S consoles have skyrocketed in prices.
The massive increases in prices could be attributed to the recent AI boom. Companies such as Google and OpenAI are hogging all of the available DRAM from an already limited range of manufacturers.
And this trend only made it worse for gamers, especially since most games these days require faster and more powerful hardware.
That said, Xbox Cloud Gaming also uses DRAM, but at times when they’re not used for actual gaming or during periods of low usage, Microsoft allocates it to AI. This allows them to squeeze as much revenue as possible beyond just gaming.
In other words, Microsoft is also contributing to the DRAM price crisis, all while offering a solution through “cheaper” access to cloud gaming via Xbox Game Pass.
At this point, we can only wait for the AI bubble to burst in the hopes that DRAM and other hardware prices will go back to normal.
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