All of my friends are available to invite into games, and all of my Xbox achievements sync up to my profile. Right away, I'm back in my current save, and ready to get gaming. When I fire up Prey on my phone, my save files synchronize from the cloud, uploaded from my home Xbox. The Xbox ecosystem in general is already just far more cloud-aware and cloud-capable than some of the competing solutions out there.
#Cloudplay subscriptions windows#
Source: Windows Central (Image credit: Source: Windows Central) There is a range of great phone clips for Xbox Game Pass cloud gaming designed exactly for that purpose, but they're a bit clunky to use, as we'll discuss in the next section.
If you're gaming on your phone, chances are you don't want to be heaving around an additional peripheral, which also needs to be charged up and most likely connected with Bluetooth. This is where xCloud can really shine in my view. Some of these games can be played entirely without an attached controller, with user interfaces designed and scaled to match your smartphone's touch screen. Some games are even cloud-aware, including the likes of Streets of Rage 4, Hades, and Minecraft Dungeons. Many large AAA games are available in the service, on devices that aren't powerful enough to run them natively. Microsoft has also partnered heavily with EA to bring many of its classics to the service, alongside various other major publishers. Microsoft has made apparent its desire to include all of these games day one into Xbox Game Pass, which is the type of commitment Google Stadia, PlayStation Now, and others have simply failed to match. Microsoft also intends to buy Activision Blizzard, which will boost Xbox Game Pass and cloud by a truly insane amount. Microsoft has invested a mountain of cash into its portfolio, buying various studios like Undead Labs, Compulsion, Obsidian, Playground Games, and publisher ZeniMax Media itself, responsible for Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and DOOM. Where competitors definitively do not have an edge is the library quality. Although, I would say that at the very least, NVIDIA GeForce still has an edge here, as of 2022. Overall, I am seeing performance quality far closer to Stadia than I was previously, at least where latency and artifacts are concerned. I get a far, far better experience in the suburbs in Germany, with 100MB down, possibly due to lower amounts of congestion and noise. Signal noise and congestion in cities seems to play a big role in the quality of xCloud. Sadly, it didn't seem to make a huge difference as you might expect. I recently upgraded to 1,000MB down with Wi-Fi 6, to see how it might improve the experience. I was also using their in-house Virgin Media "SuperHub," made in partnership with Netgear, which is notoriously bad for signal degradation. The last time I wrote this, I was on 100MB down with Virgin Media in the U.K. It's difficult to review latency definitively, because for you as the end-user, so many variables can impact your experience. The gap is steadily closing, and I'm now able to reliably play Halo at 60 FPS without having to account for lag or major artifacts, although again, the latency varies heavily depending on whether I'm in the U.K.
#Cloudplay subscriptions update#
More recently, Microsoft rolled out some kind of OS update on the server-side, producing latency and streaming quality far closer to what we get on some of its competitors. NVIDIA GeForce Now and other services consistently best Microsoft's offering in tests, at least previously. One of the biggest drawbacks of xCloud versus some of its competitors was latency superiority. Well, provided you have a consistent connection, that is. For its Xbox customers, Microsoft is gradually rolling out the ability to take your console experience with you anywhere, on any device, at any time. Since then, Microsoft has become something of a cloud powerhouse, hitting an astronomical market cap in a battle for service dominance with Amazon and others.
We have reports and documents dating all the way back to 2012, about 10 years ago, where Microsoft began exploring and ramping up its tech in this space. Xbox Game Pass's cloud platform is pioneering, and many years in the works. Source: Jez Corden | Windows Central (Image credit: Source: Jez Corden | Windows Central)
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