Xbox Cloud Gaming’s Growth and Evolution

It’s our mission at Xbox to bring the joy and community to gaming by putting players at the center of everything we do. Our goal is to make it possible for everyone to enjoy the games that they love, and with people who like them, using the same devices. It’s called Xbox Everywhere.

As we look to make gaming more accessible to even more people, and reach the three billion players globally, we’ve invested heavily in the cloud – both for players so they can play the way they want, and for creators so they engage new, larger audiences and build, run and manage their games using best-in-class cloud tools and services. We’ve built this in partnership with Azure, which reaches more people than any other cloud provider.

Since launching in 2020, we’ve seen tremendous growth: More than 10,000,000 people have so far streamed Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta), as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate..

We are proud to announce another milestone in our expansion of our cloud business model. Today, we will make cloud accessible to even more people through more channels. Epic has partnered with the company FortniteCloud Gaming offers this feature. So fans can now play from their iOS, Android, and tablet devices, as well as Windows PCs through a web browser. This is just the beginning for us – we’re going to learn, implement feedback, and in time look to bring even more free-to-play titles to players through the cloud.

Our continued growth and ability to enable new business models has been driven by the way we’ve evolved cloud to make it part of the Xbox ecosystem. Our first launch was on Android running only from Xbox One S servers within our datacenters. Cloud Gaming has since upgraded to Custom Xbox Series X server and launched on Windows, Apple and tablet PCs. We’ve also started rolling out it on Steam Deck.|X, and we’ve even started rolling it out on Steam Deck. We’ve also seen the community load it up on some unconventional devices via browser, although it looks like they were having a lot of fun. In total, Players from all walks of the game26 CountriesI have tried more than 6000 different devices from Android phones of various varieties to all generations of iPhones and PCs..

We’ve also enabled Cloud Gaming in more places, like Mexico, Japan, Australia, and Brazil. We have been blown away by the response from all of these new countries. Brazil has especially impressed us. The adoption rate was staggering within the first week. Our server capacity quickly exceeded the demands of fans and we were forced to rapidly deploy additional hardware in order to cope with the increased demand. The support we’ve seen going to new countries, paired with making more games available on more devices, has led to encouraging results. In the months ahead, you should expect cloud gaming to become available in even more places – we can’t wait to share more.

Great content is the key to all of it. Our unique situation is not just that we have a first-party cloud capable of delivering the games but also a rich gaming history with many studios creating titles from different genres. Since launching under two years ago, we’ve worked with over 125 developers to make more than 350 games from the Xbox Game Pass catalog cloud enabled. We’ve also seen the power of cloud as a discovery mechanism by reducing the time to simply try out and play new games. On average, Xbox Game Pass players who use cloud, discover and play nearly twice as many games as Xbox Game Pass members who don’t play on cloud.

The way games are being delivered to devices has also evolved – when we began all of our games followed a lift-and-shift model to make it as easy as possible for studios to make games playable on cloud. Games would work seamlessly on the cloud platform without any need for code modifications. It has helped to grow the game catalog by adding hundreds of new games. Many games also play well this way.

We’ve evolved over time and are also making it possible for games to be Cloud Aware; simple changes from the developer can enhance the whole experience. They may choose to add touch controls – either a basic overlay to fully custom controls like you see with Hades – or optimizing font size based on the device being streamed to. Cloud gaming was launched with Minecraft Dungeons, a cloud-aware game with touch controls. More than 150 games that are cloud-aware now offer touch., and we’ve found games with touch controls lead to more engagement. In general, games with touch controls see a 2x increase in play, while 20% of Xbox Cloud Gaming players use touch only..

Cloud-aware titles can also be used to run more complex games. This makes it possible for Gen-9 titles to be played on Xbox One through the cloud. Microsoft Flight Simulator is a great example. Microsoft Flight Simulator, which was made available online on March 1st, quickly rose in popularity. For the month March, the top cloud games on tablets, phones and PCs was Cloud Wars.. Players who otherwise wouldn’t have access to Gen-9 titles now have the opportunity to jump in on the devices they own.

I’ll never forget the first time I played a console game on my mobile phone powered by the cloud; it was quite simply a magical experience. That was many years ago as we’ve been on this cloud journey for some time alongside a wonderful and engaged player community and incredible content partners. All creators and players have bright prospects together, according to us.