Project xCloud, Microsoft’s game streaming service, has felt somewhat incomplete since it officially launched back in September. Support has been limited to Android devices only, but that’ll change in Spring 2021. Next year, xCloud on iOS will finally become a thing, as will support for streaming games on PC.
Microsoft dropped the news this morning, stating the following:
In Spring 2021, we will take the next step in our journey to reach more players around the world by making cloud gaming as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate available on Windows PCs through the Xbox app and browser, and iOS devices through mobile web browser.
On the iOS side, it’ll be very interesting to see how xCloud functions through a web interface. Thanks to Apple’s fairly ridiculous and arcane rules about game streaming apps, xCloud can’t exist as a standalone experience like it can on Android. It must use a web browser instead. I personally would be more skeptical if not for the fact that Amazon’s Luna service is doing exactly this, and manages to do it pretty well.
As far as xCloud on PC goes, I can’t believe it has taken this long. Windows is a Microsoft platform, and probably should have been the first one Microsoft targeted for xCloud support. If you have an Xbox at home and you want to stream some games while traveling for work (well, when that is feasible again), it seems far more likely you’d prefer to do that on the larger screen of a laptop versus a smartphone. But anyway.
We’ll have our eyes peeled for more specifics about when xCloud will launch on these platforms.
