Microsoft announces Project xCloud game streaming service

[Arthur]

XBox 1U? 😉

 

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/08/project-xcloud-gaming-with-you-at-the-center

 

The future of gaming is a world where you are empowered to play the games you want, with the people you want, whenever you want, wherever you are, and on any device of your choosing. Our vision for the evolution of gaming is similar to music and movies — entertainment should be available on demand and accessible from any screen. Today, I’m excited to share with you one of our key projects that will take us on an accelerated journey to that future world: Project xCloud.

 

Today, the games you play are very much dictated by the device you are using. Project xCloud’s state-of-the-art global game-streaming technology will offer you the freedom to play on the device you want without being locked to a particular device, empowering YOU, the gamers, to be at the center of your gaming experience.

 

Content and community

Ultimately, Project xCloud is about providing gamers — whether they prefer console or PC — new choices in when and where they play, while giving mobile-only players access to worlds, characters and immersive stories they haven’t been able to experience before.

 

To realize this vision, we know we must make it easy for developers to bring their content to Project xCloud. Developers of the more than 3,000 games available on Xbox One today, and those building the thousands that are coming in the future, will be able to deploy and dramatically scale access to their games across all devices on Project xCloud with no additional work.

 

About Project xCloud

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 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.

 

Developers and researchers at Microsoft Research are creating ways to combat latency through advances in networking topology, and video encoding and decoding. Project xCloud will have the capability to make game streaming possible on 4G networks and will dynamically scale to push against the outer limits of what’s possible on 5G networks as they roll out globally. Currently, the test experience is running at 10 megabits per second. Our goal is to deliver high-quality experiences at the lowest possible bitrate that work across the widest possible networks, taking into consideration the uniqueness of every device and network.

 

 

[sted]

personally at least atm i see this more aimed at places like india where they have a fast growing 4g network (or at least thats my understanding) and most have never had / seen game consoles and probably would find it harder to find the cash for a "real" console. If ms can get a foothold in gaming there on cheap devices before sony/google id imagine theres a lot more money to be made there. I also see traditional gaming going at least partially that way at some point that way you cant pay £60 for a game and have it forever same as with netflix as long as you have a sub watch what you want but if you watched something and no longer have a sub your sol. it makes sense in this more and more service oriented world where nobody owns anything you just have a license to use it

[RLR]

Isn't this similar to OnLive (didn't last very long)? I can see it working for single player games but I guess latency would be an issue in multiplayer games. Hopefully this paragraph will prove me wrong:

 

Developers and researchers at Microsoft Research are creating ways to combat latency through advances in networking topology, and video encoding and decoding. Project xCloud will have the capability to make game streaming possible on 4G networks and will dynamically scale to push against the outer limits of what’s possible on 5G networks as they roll out globally. Currently, the test experience is running at 10 megabits per second. Our goal is to deliver high-quality experiences at the lowest possible bitrate that work across the widest possible networks, taking into consideration the uniqueness of every device and network.

[Arthur]

First public demo of xCloud...

 

[FishCustard]

I like the concept - I have a decent-enough PC, but it's getting long in the tooth now and I don't really want to build a new one given that I only play games occasionally. Not sure why they showed people playing on a tiny screen - wouldn't be my choice, but I guess they're showing how it can be used over 4G networks.

[sted]

I like the concept - I have a decent-enough PC, but it's getting long in the tooth now and I don't really want to build a new one given that I only play games occasionally. Not sure why they showed people playing on a tiny screen - wouldn't be my choice, but I guess they're showing how it can be used over 4G networks.

 

im guessing because a lot of the target audience has a phone and dosent have a desktop pc these days

[TechMonkey]

Also shows versatility. If it works on a phone without lag or issues then a desk device should be perfect.