Xbox's Cloud Gaming and remote play services are seeing excessively long load times as holiday demand hits servers.

When launching a game -- for example, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 -- the queue page does show up. In one case, it showed a wait time of more than 3 hours. On typical days, there's hardly any queue. When there is one, it's usually a few minutes.

Chances are that, like me, you've been unable to escape the chorus of 'This is an Xbox.' This insistent marketing campaign touts the cloud-based future Microsoft is striving for with Xbox, moving away from the console-based core of yore towards a platform that can play with almost any stage.