Why a pass, and not a box

Most game hosting sells you a box. You pick an amount of memory, you guess whether it is enough, and you find out when your friends join. If you want to play something else next month, you buy a second box or you throw the first one away.

A pass is a slot, not a machine

A Pass is one server slot. Put a game in it and play. When you are done, freeze the world: the save goes to cold storage and the compute is released. Later, thaw it — or a different world entirely — onto any idle pass you hold. Switching games takes about a minute.

You never choose RAM or cores, because a game is only sold on a pass once it has been shown to run there. That is a deliberately narrower promise than "it should fit": fitting on paper stopped being good enough for us the day a memory limit turned out to be a hard kill rather than a slow server.

What that changes

• A world you are not playing costs you nothing in compute.
• Trying a new game does not mean a new subscription.
• The build you get is the newest one, and no session is ever ended to deliver it.