Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that more than 10M people had streamed games over Xbox Cloud Gaming during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.
Cloud gaming is a component that’s only known as a portion of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate tier of $14.99 every month, so the formation shared Tuesday indicates that many people are checking it out.
It’s also a vital stat in a field where there have been few — Google doesn’t spoil out numbers for Stadia, and any numbers shared by Nvidia for GeForce Now include people who have used a no-strings-attached free trial.
As Microsoft said in January, game Pass has proven to be famous that the service grew to have 25 million subscribers, up from 18 million the year before. Again, however, it’s unclear how Microsoft is determining what matters as a streamed game from Xbox Cloud Gaming, so we don’t understand exactly what the stat might represent, how many current subscribers are incorporated in that streamed game count, or how much playtime is needed for the company to count it as a stream.
It’s also good to cite that you can technically sign up for a month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for only a dollar and then withdraw. But, again, it’s murky how many people who did that and streamed a game might also be calculated in Microsoft’s figure conveyed Tuesday.
Microsoft has financed heavily into Xbox Cloud Gaming, launching first on Android, iOS and PC, and Xbox consoles. As a result, you can now stream an extensive library of Xbox games across various devices. And as of October, the service is comprehensively powered by custom Xbox Series X hardware, which improved framerates and load times, making it much more reasonable to operate.
But the company has also seen robust hardware sales, with Xbox just keeping its best March sales execution in 11 years and next-generation Xboxes evolving much better readily available.
Microsoft said Tuesday that Xbox hardware revenue is up 14 percent. However, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood warned that Chinese production shutdowns could affect future hardware sales, including “constrained console supply.”
Xbox Cloud Gaming
The ideas for the cloud service came from Microsoft around 2016, around the same time that Kareem Choudhry developed the Xbox 360 backward compatibility for the Xbox One.
As his team created this solution, Choudhry also had the idea if they could provide these games without needing a console and got Spencer’s go-ahead to start a small group to determine the feasibility of cloud gaming. The technology was deemed successful enough around Xbox Game Pass’s introduction that Microsoft constructed a larger team to construct the cloud gaming platform.
Microsoft knocked the service at E3 2018 and formally declared Project xCloud several months later, in October 2018. They explained the service in March 2019 with the racing game Forza Horizon 4 playing on Android mobile with an Xbox One controller.
Xbox head Phil Spencer employed a private server during this term to test games on a remote connection. The service entered its home testing phase in May 2019, when it could be used outside the lab environment. It entered public testing later and was unveiled at E3 2019.
Microsoft said that its Xbox content library would make its service more attractive than competitors such as Stadia. The hardware at launch employed Xbox One S-based blade servers but started to transition to Xbox Series X-based servers in June 2021. Every server initially had four custom-made Xbox One S-based divisions for the 2018 teaser, but this was doubled to eight per server in a 2U compartment for the service’s launch in 2019.
Analogized to the standard Xbox One S, power consumption has been decreased by 30% through processor-specific power tuning. In addition, video output is set to 120 Hz to undervalue latency.