Yeah, needing a controller is the only limitation I don’t like. I understand that it’s going to a Xbox Series X server though, so the requirement makes sense. But it means I can’t play Quake at work this morning through xCloud, since I don’t have a controller. Once I could get into the game, it does have keyboard and mouse support even on Series X, so I could get it work that way if I had a controller.
(And yes, the need to be an insider is old news, it’s open to all Ultimate members now).
I use an old wired 360 controller, so it doesn’t need to be wireless. Although it does occasionally fail to be recognized on Chrome. Logging in with Edge fixes that.
The xCloud games are all Xbox versions so yes you do need a gamepad.
Okay, the state of things is better than I thought. My controller is wired, and I didn’t want to bother with Insider - sounds like neither is an issue and all I’d need is Ultimate. Thanks all!
Mouse and keyboard support is coming to xCloud. I’m surprised. But glad. This truly does mean I can just hop onto a browser at work sometimes when I’m by myself.
Just played my first game on mobile using this - I’d tried it out on PC/Xbox before. It’s remarkable how hard it is to shake the Nintendo control scheme when playing handheld. I spent a full minute pressing B instead of A and wondering why nothing was happening.
Do you have an overall impression? I love the idea of it.
Too early for proper impressions. Also this is on my extremely fast home wifi, so not really a good test of performance where I’d actually use it.
Just FYI, it’s free to try with Fortnite right now. Even if you don’t want to play Fortnite it’s a good demo of sorts to see if it runs well on your connection
I really hate this trend of TV manufacturers gating what are basically streaming video apps behind their most recent models. I think the only things like this that have come to my 2017 LG in the last three years at least are Disney+ and AppleTV+, and it lost MLB.tv after a year or two. When I bought it, the smart functionality pretty much obsoleted all my streaming devices, at least for convenience, but just a handful of years later it would be impossible not to use some sort of device to get fairly basic smart functionality (even the native screen mirroring has stopped working, although that might be related to my setup).
I saw this:
I tried the Stadia app on my 2021 LG TV and the input latency and overall stream stability was awful compared to using Stadia on the exact same wifi network on my phone and PC, so there’s probably some merit to this.
Here’s the article with more details:
Especially shit when they’re steadily also reducing or eliminating their support for anyone who wants or needs a primary TV smaller than an entire house. I have the model of TCL 4K Roku TV I have because they eliminated the 43" size in that product line for the following year (which is the one I bought it in). The smallest is now 50". 43" is already ridiculously large and I can barely fit it in my setup.
That’s one of the major reasons I like the Roku ecosystem. They only retired support for Roku 2 devices from 2011 last year IIRC.
Remember when Samsung put PS Now on their TVs 8 years ago? It’s why I laugh every time someone on a podcast talks about getting Xcloud built into TVs represents some kind of massive sea change.
I don’t, actually. How did that turn out?
I think some reviewers said it actually worked pretty well at the time, although the PS Now platform was much more limited in terms of the games you could play compared to gamepass. But at the time, if you had a good internet connection, apparently it played pretty well?
But then Sony shut it down a few years later, because they didn’t want people playing sony games without buying sony hardware.
I actually switched to Edge about a year ago and it really feels no different than Chrome at this point. It also uses less resources than Chrome which one of the reasons I originally made the switch in the first place. It wasn’t a huge difference though.
Edge is literally Chrome but with all the Google-data plumbing ripped out.