Xbox apes Netflix with $10 per month, 100-game unlimited “Pass”

Enlarge / A promotional image shows some of the games you’ll be able to download for one monthly subscription price through Xbox Game Pass. (credit: Xbox Wire ) Borrowing a page from Netflix’s unlimited subscription model, Microsoft today announced Game Pass , a service that will offer downloadable copies of over 100 Xbox One and backwards-compatible Xbox 360 games from the systems’ legacy catalogs for a $10-per-month subscription. Microsoft hasn’t provided a full list of games that will be available yet, but an e-mailed announcement included Halo 5: Guardians, Saints Row IV Re-Elected, NBA 2K16, Mad Max, LEGO Batman, Mega Man Legacy Collection, Terraria, Payday 2, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Fable III, SoulCalibur II and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 as examples of what to expect at launch. Publishers taking part in the program include 2K, 505 Games, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Codemasters, Deep Silver, Focus Home Interactive, Sega, SNK, THQ Nordic GmbH, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, and Microsoft Studios. New games will cycle in and out of availability with some regularity, Microsoft said. Still, based on the above list, we wouldn’t expect any major new releases to hit Game Pass until well after their traditional retail launches. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Xbox apes Netflix with $10 per month, 100-game unlimited “Pass”

Amazon cloud sputters for hours, and a boatload of websites go offline

Enlarge (credit: Amazon) When the Amazon infrastructure-as-a-service cloud goes down, Internet users are going to notice. Amazon Web Services, which powers a whole bunch of websites and online services, has been struggling today, and numerous sites that rely on Amazon infrastructure have gone offline as a result. Appropriately enough, ” Is It Down Right Now? ,” a site that tells you whether other sites are down, has been struggling to stay online. Other apparent victims include The AV Club , Trello, Quora, IFTTT, Open Whisper Systems , and websites created with Wix . Oh the irony! https://t.co/UlVux2PETS is down now too. #aws #s3 — Gillian Owen (@gilliancowen) February 28, 2017 Amazon itself was initially having trouble providing updates to its service health site. But the company posted this note at 2:35pm ET: “We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard…. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Amazon cloud sputters for hours, and a boatload of websites go offline