Project xCloud - Microsoft wants you to not own any games

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.

Not sure this is exactly the place for this, but it seems like the closest fit - just for the heck of it, I figured I’d try out Assassins Creed Odyssey last night through the cloud. I was really pleased to notice that it runs very well, no hitches, looks nice. Not 4K nice, but I wasn’t expecting that anyway. I’m not sure that I’d say it was quite as smooth as the Stadia test I took part in either, but then again that was on a wired PC connection, and I’m playing my Xbox over wifi. I only ever really dink around with cloud gaming every now and then, but I can say that every time I check it out it feels like it’s improved.

Oh forgot to mention - I was pleased to notice that, while I don’t believe the DLC is part of the Game Pass availability, it did seem to recognize that I owned them and let me access them through the cloud.

One thing I really appreciate about Microsoft’s cloud gaming is how they acknowledge when you own the expansion pack(s) to a game. When I launch Vampire Survivor on the cloud on my phone, the first thing it does is “Checking DLC”, and when the game launches on the cloud, it gives me access to the DLC that I own.

Contrast that with Playstation Now, where I can play the cloud version of Bloodborne because it’s on the service, but I can’t play my character who has played the DLC, because the cloud version doesn’t have access to the DLC, even though I own the expansion.

Microsoft markets DLC to Game Pass subscribers. You get Forza free, but you want to play those expansions? Sure, happy to sell them to you even though you don’t own the game. So they support the DLC on the cloud, on cross-platform titles, etc so that the value is there for GP subscribers to buy.

I’m surprised Sony isn’t doing this. Likely because of the nightmarish complexity of managing entitlements for purchases, subscriptions, streaming entitlement, etc. across multiple potential play surfaces. It can be done (MS is doing it), but it’s not simple.

Hm, I might have a PC hookup up to my 42" sitting room tv soon. So the GamePass Ultimate subscription lets you stream games that are available on the cloud to your browser… but also lets you play Game Pass games free but that you have to download and install more traditionally, which has a different / more expansive library? Is that right?

The xCloud library is a subset of Game Pass. If your PC is connected to the TV and is gaming capable, the only real reason to use xCloud is for console exclusives . Unless you really don’t want to wait for a download.

Do you think xCloud might give better performance then a non-gaming laptop when hooked up to a 4K TV or is neither the laptop nor xCloud likely to give satisfactory performance? I tried hooking a mid-tier laptop to the TV to run AoW4 and it was not a happy camper, while AoW4 isn’t on Game Pass, I do wonder if other games might work better using xCloud then running directly on the laptop.