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Ahead of the Xbox showcase this week, there have been rumblings of an ad-based plan being added to Xbox Cloud Gaming. The existence of such a plan is not surprising, as Microsoft has previously made its intentions clear regarding such plans.
As early as October last year, we had heard, thanks to reporting at The Verge, that there was internal testing of Xbox Cloud Gaming with ads. However, intentions and actions are different, and while Microsoft’s intentions were known, we are only just now seeing a potential rollout.
This comes courtesy of Tim Warren, the senior editor of The Verge, who took to Bluesky to post this:
As of now, the source of the image is unknown, though the artwork matches the UI seen across Xbox services. This has also been seen by other users, which means this is an all but confirmed rollout potentially ahead of this week’s showcase.
The “one hour of ad-supported playtime per session” raises questions around how this may function. The likely option is that, similar to non-premium users of spotify the ads will interrupt the service occasionally, with this image suggesting per hour.
The Xbox Cloud Gaming feature was originally added to the Ultimate tier of Xbox Game Pass, with it being added to all tiers of Game Pass a few months later. This would appear to add a new free tier, allowing access to just Cloud Gaming for the price of Ads, preempting your hour of playtime for cloud streaming games like Fortnite.
At this time, there is no information on any potential changes to other tiers, so while we expect that tiers from essential and upwards will retain their good deals with unlimited access to Xbox Cloud Gaming, we will update you if this changes.
While we are still awaiting more confirmation, we will hopefully know the full story after the Xbox Showcase on January 22 later this week.
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