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Now we move on to Microsoft with Project xCloud. Microsoft is in a unique position at the start of this new console generation. After the stumbles with the Xbox One’s launch in 2013, they spent that entire generation trying to regain ground after Sony dominated the console market with the PS4. I don’t really believe in the “underdog” narrative for Microsoft, a corporation so large it could potentially buy five countries in a single day, but they came into the eighth console generation with a lot to prove. They’ve certainly done a lot right in regaining fans with the redesigned Xbox One S and the significantly more powerful Xbox One X, as well as releasing an adaptive controller for the disabled market and making large shockwaves through the industry with the forward-thinking Xbox Game Pass, which still stands as the best value in gaming today. All of this is on top of massive studio acquisitions for their platform, with the most recent one being Bethesda along with releasing their next gen platforms, the Xbox Series X & S, which already outpace the original Xbox One hardware and runs circles around it. Obviously, they’ve been hard at work with their plans to expand Xbox past the console as they try to sell you on having Xbox everywhere, regardless of where you play. That might mean Microsoft won’t have true “console exclusives” that sell units, but they have Game Pass which is essentially the platform that Microsoft really wants to sell. It may not be an exciting thing for the “core gamer” who may spend hundreds of dollars on games a year, but this is a smart and calculated move by the Xbox team. Microsoft wants a larger grip in Eastern Asia and the Middle East countries where consoles are potentially expensive or outright banned in the region, but smartphones are incredibly easy to obtain, which is where Project xCloud comes in. This was formally announced at their E3 press event in 2019 and began a closed beta that year to select Microsoft insiders. That closed beta quickly became public and now xCloud is available on Android devices through the Xbox Game Pass app and as of late, became available again through iOS via a web browser to get around Apple’s App Store policies, something that is an entirely separate can of worms. However, xCloud is still in its infancy and needs fixes to stability, performance, and speed of the platform. As of right now, xCloud’s backend is running on Xbox One S hardware which means a lot of games run at that console’s resolution and base frame rate. That makes artifacting noticeable and whenever there is a dip in the connection, you can feel that input delay. Yet, Microsoft does have plans to update xCloud with Xbox Series X blade hardware, meaning games will run faster and artifacting/compression shouldn’t be as noticeable. Behind the scenes, they are trying to stabilize performance of xCloud through background updates and have considerably improved since the closed beta. It still isn’t perfect, but Microsoft has avoided the faults of their competitors through one simple thing: OnLive, Sony, and Google all wanted streaming to replace the traditional model of gaming, but right now, Microsoft sees it as a supplement to the traditional model and not as a replacement. That could come down to various factors but the main one, outside of the internet structure, is the fact that Microsoft wants xCloud to complement Xbox Game Pass.
