What would you do if you could literally play your XBox One games anywhere? What if they would look just as good as they do on the console you have at home? Welcome to Microsoft’s new, highly-ambitious video game streaming service, Project xCloud.
Not only is this Microsoft’s first endeavor into game streaming, but the service plans to give the world accessibility to games on any device, anywhere in the world. The company claims that you can essentially stop playing Halo 5 on your console, and jump onto your tablet or phone to keep the gaming going.
Microsoft plans to publically test Project xCloud next year. You will not only be able to sync your controllers (via Bluetooth) to your devices. There will be a touch input system that allows controller-free play as well.
In a recent blog post, Microsoft says that game developers will be able to support the service “with no additional work” and that they are trying to solve the latency issues of data centers and developing “a new, game-specific touch input overlay” for touch gameplay.
According to Microsoft:
“Our goal with Project xCloud is to deliver a quality experience for all gamers on all devices that’s consistent with the speed and high-fidelity gamers experience and expect on their PCs and consoles.
Scaling and building out Project xCloud is a multi-year journey for us. We’ll begin public trials in 2019 so we can learn and scale with different volumes and locations.
Our focus is on delivering an amazing added experience to existing Xbox players and on empowering developers to scale to hundreds of millions of new players across devices.
Our goal with Project xCloud is to deliver a quality experience for all gamers on all devices. One that’s consistent with the speed and high-fidelity gamers experience and expect on their PCs and consoles.
We’ve enabled compatibility with existing and future Xbox games. By building out custom hardware for our datacenters that leverages our years of console and platform experience.
We’ve architected a new customizable blade that can host the component parts of multiple Xbox One consoles, as well as the associated infrastructure supporting it.
We will scale those custom blades in datacenters across Azure regions over time.”
This announcement comes a week after Google announced its first attempt at streaming games with Project Stream. Google’s Service entered a closed Beta test over the weekend, allowing users to play Assassin’s Creed in Google Chrome.
