If there is one thing that many Xbox fans have been waiting for, it is bringing xCloud, or as Microsoft calls it, Cloud Gaming, to the PC. It has been a strange omission in the Cloud Gaming narrative so far, but that should change in the near future.
In December, Microsoft announced that iOS and the PC would be added to the xCloud experience in the spring of 2021 and we are now starting to see little progress towards that goal.
Over the past few weeks, Microsoft has launched ‘Cloud Gaming’, via the browser, to a large group of users within Microsoft. To date, this is the largest group of beta testers of cloud games for iterating the service on the PC and this is one of the last steps before being publicly offered in a preview state.
For those who are testing the service within Microsoft, they report that the experience is somewhat problematic at the moment, but that is expected. In addition, the streaming service only works with Chrome and Edge at the moment. Firefox and Safari users will need to change their browsing habits if they want to use the service.
One thing I’m not entirely sure about right now is whether the standalone app for Cloud Gaming will exist when the service makes its public debut. At the end of last year, an application leaked that allowed you to play xCloud on your PC, but that application experience may be going away in favor of the browser solution.
Microsoft could still choose to offer both solutions, after all, the ‘app’ could just be a web wrapper, but the bottom line is that Cloud Gaming on the PC is advancing at a rate that should allow Microsoft to meet its stated goal of a spring release. That said, the service’s iOS iteration doesn’t seem to be as far along in the testing phases as the PC, but that solution is a little more complicated thanks to Apple store policies.
XCloud was initially launched on Android and these users can stream games today. But with billions more users on PC and iOS, allowing these platforms to stream games will open up the Xbox world to a much larger gaming audience.
Tagged with Cloud Gaming, Microsoft, xCloud