Microsoft will indeed follow through on its plan to open its xCloud game streaming service to the public later this year. According to Mark Skwarski, a senior product marketing manager at Xbox, xCloud is currently in the hands of Microsoft employees around the world.
“We are scaling the program up globally. We have deployed project xCloud blades into data centers in 13 regions around the world. We’ve also started our alpha testing,” Skwarski told a group of reporters at an E3 briefing this morning. “Many employees like myself have access to Project xCloud.” Skwarski added that starting later this year, the public will be able to get its hands on the service as well.
That information clears up some confusion Microsoft created during its E3 press conference in Los Angeles yesterday. Xbox chief Phil Spencer appeared to temper expectations around the company’s cloud gaming initiative by announcing a new streaming mode feature for Xbox owners that’s basically no different than Sony’s existing Remote Play for the PlayStation 4. He also seemed to imply that xCloud’s future was closely tied to the upcoming Project Scarlett console, the next-generation Xbox slated for 2020.
Spencer didn’t mention a public test of xCloud, despite the company having committed to public trials when it announced xCloud in October 2018 and having repeated that commitment in a video demo back in March, before Google’s Stadia reveal. Spencer also didn’t mention anything about streaming to TVs, browsers, or PCs, as Stadia does thanks to Chrome and Chromecast. That led some, like The Verge’s Tom Warren, to appropriately speculate that Microsoft purposefully kept its xCloud talk during its E3 showing to a minimum because it feels the service is nowhere near ready to compete with Google Stadia.
While we don’t know Microsoft’s internal thinking here, it does seem like xCloud is not as ambitious in its current form as it was when it was first announced, when Microsoft’s cloud gaming chief Kareem Choudhry promised the service would work on consoles and PCs in addition to mobile devices. During the E3 briefing, Skwarski said that Microsoft is right now only focusing on mobile devices, so smartphones and tablets only. It’s also not designing xCloud in its current form to work on cellular connections. Instead, it will start as Wi-Fi only.
That doesn’t mean xCloud won’t one day get to the level of ambition that Google has with Stadia. But Google has come out of the gate in the cloud gaming race with a rather impressive service that works across TVs, browsers, and mobile devices, and it’s capable of pushing 4K at 60 fps thanks to its 10.7 teraflops per user of processing power. Google has also outlined pricing for its service, given it a commercial release date for this November, and announced that it will let game publishers build or offer their own subscriptions on top of Stadia.
Microsoft may have been caught flat-footed by Google’s aggressive willingness to get into the cloud gaming space, and that’s why it doesn’t have more to say about xCloud at this year’s E3. But that said, it’s reassuring to know that, at some point later this year, xCloud will be made available to the public.
That way, we’ll be able to properly compare it to Stadia. Because regardless of what devices are supported, what games are available, or how much cloud gaming services like these will cost, the technology won’t get off the ground if the latency is unmanageable or the services just plain don’t work well at launch. Hopefully, by this fall, both Google and Microsoft are in a position to bring these services to consumers’ living rooms.
