The latest company to offer a cloud gaming service to its userbase, Microsoft’s Xbox team has today rolled out Xbox Cloud Gaming onto the Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One gaming consoles. The service is now available to those who have a Game Pass Ultimate Subscription in 25 regions including Australia, France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom – with more countries to be supported in the near future. However, even if you are in one of those countries, the roll-out will only be to a limited subset of Xbox gamers, with a full-scale launch to be completed in the coming weeks.
Below is a statement from Xbox Cloud Gaming’s Vice President and Head of Product – Catherine Gluckstein:
We know from you that you want to find and try Xbox Game Pass games before you install them — and today we’re enabling just that. Now you can discover and try lots of different titles quickly right from the cloud until you land on the one you may want to also install — which is still the flagship experience for Xbox consoles. In addition to that, getting a game invite from a friend for a game you haven’t downloaded yet is no longer going to stop you from joining right away! We’ve built it so the experience is fast, easy, and a great way to discover your next favorite game while saving space on your hard drive for the games you plan to play again and again.
For Xbox One users, cloud gaming also allows you to play some next gen games on the Xbox One console you already own. This means select games that are currently only playable on Xbox Series X|S, like Recompile, The Medium, and The Riftbreaker, are now playable on your Xbox One with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and cloud gaming. We will also continue to support this capability and expand our cloud game library to include more next gen games like Microsoft Flight Simulator in early 2022.
Xbox follows a number of other services entering the cloud gaming market, following the likes of NVidia’s GeForce Now which recently launched in Australia, and Sony Interactive Entertainment’s PlayStation Now service which has been around since 2014 in certain regions.
