On October 1st, 2025 I was absolutely gutted over the news I had just received. My beloved Game Pass subscription, for which I had been spreading the gospel of its value for years, had just increased in pricing. “What the hell are they thinking?” I asked myself. “They can’t be serious.” I immediately could only think of one word. Enshittification. It comes for all, and it had finally come for my precious Xbox Game Pass.
Enshittification 101
Enshittification is the process of online platforms degrading over time.
Stage 1: Attract Users
Stage 2: Lock In Business Customers
Stage 3: Extract Value
So I had to know. What made them so sure they could raise the price to thirty dollars a month for a service that once sat comfortably at $9.99, and later at $14.99 for the version that included cloud gaming? Admittedly, the service has added a lot: more first-party studios, day-one releases, a larger rotating library, cloud gaming access, cross-platform play, and the rising cost of maintaining the infrastructure that supports all of it.
In their announcement, there was a clear emphasis on cloud gaming. And as someone with blazing fast fiber internet but an aging PC, I started to wonder if maybe there was something to cloud gaming that I could genuinely use.
Looking for an Escape Route
So I started looking around. Who else was offering cloud gaming, and would any of them cost less than Game Pass? It felt a little like I was searching for an alternative out of spite, as if Xbox had personally offended me by asking for so much money.
Enter GeForce Now
That is when I found NVIDIA’s GeForce Now. “Your games, powered by the cloud. Play with GeForce RTX performance, anywhere,” the service promised. And it made me pause. My old GTX 980 can barely handle modern games, and any new PC I would want is easily two thousand dollars. Suddenly, paying twenty to thirty dollars a month to play the latest titles right now did not sound unreasonable at all.
The Thrill of Cloud Power
Almost instantly, I started to see GeForce Now’s value. After only a few minutes of linking my Steam library and the rest of my accounts, I was staring at a fresh lineup of games I never would have dared try on my GTX 980, especially with my hard drive space nearly gone. But before getting too excited, there was a clear difference worth noting. Game Pass gives you a library of titles included in the price, while GeForce Now is strictly a BYOG service, bring your own games, or you have nothing to play. Still, with this new capability, I was able to dive into Battlefield Redsec when it launched, experience Fortnite in full fidelity, roam the vistas of Pax Dei, play Starfield the way it was meant to be played, and finally enjoy Cyberpunk at more than 30 FPS. All of it for twenty dollars a month, not the two thousand I thought I would need to save for a new PC before I could enjoy any of these games.
It was amazing. I started running the numbers, imagining all the money I would be saving. I found myself daydreaming about never having to buy a new PC again, never stressing over GPU upgrades or whether my rig was already outdated. If a GeForce Now subscription costs twenty dollars a month, that is eight and a half years before I would spend the equivalent of a two thousand dollar prebuilt PC. And instead of getting a GPU that starts aging the day I buy it, I would be tapping into top tier hardware that gets refreshed behind the scenes every year.
Reality Hits: The Hour Cap
As a gamer, I felt like Prometheus discovering fire for the first time. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. People needed to know that cloud gaming did not suck anymore. So I went to Reddit and immediately got a reality check. One of the first posts I saw mentioned that GeForce Now has a one hundred hour limit each month, with the option to buy an extra fifteen hours for a pretty hefty fee. Somehow I had missed that in all my excitement. The disappointment hit fast. “You too?” I thought, remembering how let down I felt when Game Pass raised its prices and started to feel like it was reaching into my wallet a little too eagerly.
What You Gain vs What You Lose
So I started looking at GeForce Now’s offering with a more critical eye. What was I really getting for twenty dollars a month, and what was I giving up by choosing it over Game Pass? Day one access to major releases, for one thing. And the fact that GeForce Now only works if you already own the games. Game Pass also gives you unlimited playtime each month, which, combined with its included library, honestly could justify the extra ten dollars over GeForce Now. And since I was already pretty happy with what GeForce Now charges, I suddenly did not feel quite as betrayed by Game Pass’s thirty dollar price tag. I understood it now.
My Gaming Ecosystem, Explained
So a decision had to be made. I have been with Game Pass for years, and I have always treated it as something that sits alongside my Steam library, not in place of it. I am not saying everyone uses these services this way, but my own gaming ecosystem has always been very specific. Steam is where I buy my games, and that is not changing. Epic is where I collect my weekly free titles, hundreds of them by now. And Game Pass is where I go for subscription based gaming. Steam equals owned games. Epic equals free games. Game Pass equals rotating subscription games. Simple.
In a perfect world, Steam would handle all three roles, but they have no incentive to do that. I am sure Xbox would love to become a true storefront competitor to Steam, but that feels almost impossible. Too many people are culturally anchored to Steam, myself included. For me, Game Pass has always been an in addition to platform, not a replacement. GeForce Now, however, has the potential to fit into that space even better, not by trying to replace Steam, but by enhancing the experience I already have with it by letting me own the latest games and play them on the latest hardware through cloud gaming.
One thing that frustrated me when testing both services was how often Game Pass Cloud told me a game was not actually part of its cloud offering. If I wanted to stream it, I had to buy it separately, and of course, Game Pass wants you to buy it through the Xbox storefront. Most PC gamers just are not going to do that. We buy our games on Steam. And in direct contrast, when you try to stream a game you do not own on GeForce Now, it prompts you to purchase it on Steam. That feels natural. Gamers are far more likely to buy on Steam than split their libraries between Steam and Xbox.
When Cloud Gaming Actually Works
So choosing between the two is still tricky. What I can say is that both services are genuinely worth trying simply because they let you play anywhere. And that alone changes everything. You do not need a powerful PC to play the newest games anymore. You just need good internet. Technically the minimum is around one hundred Mbps, but if you want the flawless experience I had, you are going to want gigabit fiber. Even five hundred Mbps gets you close.
I am happy to say I was able to play on both services with zero issues across an aging PC, a MacBook Air, an iPad, and even my iPhone. You just connect a controller with Bluetooth, launch the app, and suddenly you are gaming on whatever screen is in front of you. They are not exaggerating when they say play anywhere. They actually mean it.
The Cloud Era Arrives
And that is when it really hit me. We are entering a new era of gaming. But if things are just now getting good, what does that mean for the future? Does this put us at the start of something exciting, or on the slope toward the next stage of enshittification? And will GabeN somehow save us from that fate?
What I Learned in the End
I do not feel quite as betrayed by Xbox anymore. I understand what they are trying to do, and when you compare their price to the rest of the cloud gaming space, it is actually reasonable. If anything, I have gained a new appreciation for how good cloud gaming has become because it fits my needs almost perfectly. I have plenty of devices that could never run my Steam library natively, I am nowhere near buying a new PC powerful enough for modern games, and cloud gaming lets me play everything I want using the hardware I already own. That alone feels game changing.
My daily drivers are all Apple devices, and the fact that I can now play my Steam library on them is not just convenient, it is life changing. The companies offering these services know this. Yes, there is a loud part of the gaming community that hates cloud gaming and rightfully warns that these subscription models encourage rent-seeking behavior. But even with those concerns, I think it is clear we are entering a new era of gaming. It is no longer about console wars, or the rise of PC gaming, or even the dominance of mobile gaming. This is the beginning of the Cloud Era.
What started as a moment of frustration with Xbox ended up opening my eyes to something bigger. I was so focused on the price increase that I had not realized cloud gaming had finally grown into something that could genuinely work for me. Whether I end up sticking with Game Pass, GeForce Now, or some mix of the two almost matters less now. What matters is that I have real options. And that makes the gaming landscape feel exciting again, even with the looming threat of enshittification waiting somewhere down the line.