Microsoft has been looking for a way to make Xbox Cloud Gaming cheaper for some time, and it seems the company has finally found the idea it needed: offering Xbox Cloud Gaming through an hourly payment model.

If you have ever played at an internet café, Microsoft’s idea is the same. You pay for the number of hours you want to play and use them however you like. The hours you buy do not expire, and you do not need any subscription, not even Game Pass, making this option quite affordable.

For now, this option is only available through the Insider channel, and it will become available to the general public in November if everything goes as planned. According to Microsoft, it will offer five different payment options:

• 10 hours of gameplay for $3.99, or $0.40 per hour.
• 25 hours of gameplay for $7.99, or $0.32 per hour.
• 50 hours of gameplay for $11.99, or $0.24 per hour.

The problem is that this prepaid option does not give you access to games. In other words, you can only use those hours with games you have already purchased and that are supported by the service. Buying hours does not give you access to the Game Pass game library, so the usefulness of this prepaid hourly option could end up being quite limited.

With the prepaid hourly option, you are paying to rent Microsoft’s servers, which will run the games, but you have to provide the games yourself. Otherwise, you will not be able to do anything with those hours. Game Pass subscribers will now have 5 hours of Xbox Cloud Gaming with the “Essential” plan, 10 hours with “Premium,” and 15 hours with “Ultimate.”

In other news, Microsoft may let Xbox Game Pass users build their own plan and pay only for what they want, from cloud gaming to online multiplayer.