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Why on earth would it be pay per hour or per MB? Does Netflix charge that way? How about Spotify?

Time has shown that the best revenue model for these kinds of services is finding a monthly price, or multiple tiers of a monthly price, that adequately cover the costs incurred from heavy users and light users alike.

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For end users, I agree. It’s also interesting to consider how content providers will be paid: per user who plays, per user-hour, a flat catalog fee, etc., and what downstream effects this will have on games.

Netflix and Spotify’s cost structure are different. Streaming content is cheap. Rendering a high end video game can get pricey because you need GPU time. There’s a lot of other considerations too. Like, a lot of people will pause a stream and let it sit for a few hours. That’s fine. What if people want to leave a game running for a few hours? The computational burden is still high.

I participated in the beta and I think they resolved this by setting a time out, and you get disconnected after some time.

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