[Windows Central] "It's literally tens of millions of hours." Xbox CEO Phil Spencer on Xbox Cloud Gaming's "dramatic growth,"

Ive used it a lot to play certain games on my phone, and some streaming to my laptop. And it works great for certain kinds of games, like Blue Prince and I guess Avowed works well, too - but for games that are essential like CoD and Forza Horizon the experience just isnt good enough. So a cloud-only future would mean certain games not to be playable?

I guess Im just stating the obvious, but until there is a solution to reduce input lag to be as low as it is on native hardware, its not going to be a viable alternative for my gaming habits. It would be real nice if cloud worked well enough to be an alternative, though.
 
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Now that I am on a larger screen and not squinting at the chart in my phone, I am little bit less impressed. When I see smart TVs matching the largest user groups, it makes me think those groups are smaller than I would have expected. There is no way a significant number of gamers are streaming directly from smart TVs. Or, is an Xbox branded TV next on the rumor list?
They have a partnership with Samsung which seems to be doing pretty well.
 
It's been a good try before spend potentially hours downloading a shit game system for me. Just play it on xcloud for 10 min before I download.

It also works great for indies and bc. That's pretty much all I run on my steamdeck. Since it's screen is smaller and the games are less demanding they feel like they are running natively to me. Done countless vampire survivors runs on everytime I go on the throne lol.
 
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I think streaming and whatnot are good ideas for growth into emerging markets or areas with lower income overall in which consistently good hardware could be a challenge, but I don't want anything to do with it personally.
 
most of it probably Fortnite, as it's free to play on their cloud service, it works on touch devices with touch controls, and it's more responsive than playing it natively on many mobile devices.

so a lot of kids probably use Xbox cloud streaming as their main way to play Fortnite. they even are thinking about limiting the playtime because it's so popular.

all you gotta do is google "play Fortnite" and the among the top google results is a link to play it over xCloud.

I still strongly doubt xCloud is accounting for anything higher than 15% of total Fortnite players, if even that.

But I guess such would be considered good enough for Phil to call that "doing well". I mean it is Fortnite, after all.

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Sums it up perfectly.

I think streaming and whatnot are good ideas for growth into emerging markets or areas with lower income overall in which consistently good hardware could be a challenge, but I don't want anything to do with it personally.

It's not a great solution for those markets unless they have heavily subsidized high-speed internet options. Otherwise they're looking to pay the price of the ISP on top of the cost of Game Pass to access xCloud (which isn't available as its own cheaper tier) to rent out the games you're interested in playing. Doing that over a period of even a year probably costs them more than just buying the console and getting the game, assuming it's a non-GAAS or F2P.

Also I've yet to see how MS (or any company for that matter) plan on addressing the hosting costs on their end to scale up cloud streaming to upwards 100 million or more gamers in this much-hyped "cloud future". The supposed cost savings of not providing equivalent local hardware to run the game natively in the living room, gets lost when you have to consider the costs just shift to having enough cloud hardware to power streaming sessions at acceptable resolutions, framerates & bitrates to this theoretically massive customer market. Add in the costs for server maintenance and part replacements if/when components fail due to stress, and it sounds to be a costly future even for the providers.

What really throws things off, is they'll try relying on generally higher sub costs, which naturally lowers the total market cap of customers who are likely to sub, so the costs on the provider end aren't necessarily mitigated that well.
 
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I still strongly doubt xCloud is accounting for anything higher than 15% of total Fortnite players, if even that.

I bet it's a large percentage of mobile users tho.

it's actually more responsive than the native mobile version, unless your device is good enough to run it at above 60fps, which most phones out there aren't.

it also looks much better than the mobile version
 
I bet it's a large percentage of mobile users tho.

it's actually more responsive than the native mobile version, unless your device is good enough to run it at above 60fps, which most phones out there aren't.

it also looks much better than the mobile version

I mean....c'mon, it's Fortnite. Most people on mobile are casuals, and casuals don't care about graphics or performance. They probably even aren't that good at the game compared to a typical console or PC player.

So xCloud version being more responsive & smoother is probably not a strong selling point to mobile players vs. downloading an app the same way they do for the hundreds of other games they play on their phone (for like 10 minutes 😁)
 
I mean....c'mon, it's Fortnite. Most people on mobile are casuals, and casuals don't care about graphics or performance. They probably even aren't that good at the game compared to a typical console or PC player.

So xCloud version being more responsive & smoother is probably not a strong selling point to mobile players vs. downloading an app the same way they do for the hundreds of other games they play on their phone (for like 10 minutes 😁)

it's an extreme hassle to install Fortnite on mobile. you have to download the Epic Store by going to store.epicgames.com, and install it there. then you have to make sure the epic store auto updates.
and that's on Android, not even sure if the Epic Store is on iOS yet.

the game is also massive, with patches that are sometimes up to 10gb in size. it's not really well optimised for mobile.

so googling "play Fortnite" is by far the simplest way to play it on mobile, especially for casuals.
 
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Yes, more and more people are experiencing sub-optimal latency when gaming on Xbox. Hopefully they have cross play enabled and play a lot of online games.
 
it's an extreme hassle to install Fortnite on mobile. you have to download the Epic Store by going to store.epicgames.com, and install it there. then you have to make sure the epic store auto updates.
and that's on Android, not even sure if the Epic Store is on iOS yet.

the game is also massive, with patches that are sometimes up to 10gb in size. it's not really well optimised for mobile.

so googling "play Fortnite" is by far the simplest way to play it on mobile, especially for casuals.

Well I googled it, and yep the Xbox link is the first one, then the EGS one right after it.

I didn't do that on mobile BTW, just laptop/desktop, but that was the result. So maybe xCloud's a good & big option for mobile players, I guess. At least in countries where mobile is a sizable portion of the Fortnite player base (i.e I doubt it's the case in certain Asian countries where PC is dominant).
 
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