At Xbox, our mission is to bring joy and community to gaming by putting players at the center of everything we do. We want to make it possible for anyone, anywhere, to play the games they want, with the people they want, on the devices they already own. We call this Xbox Everywhere.
As we strive to make gaming more accessible to even more people and to reach the three billion gamers worldwide, we have invested heavily in the cloud – both for gamers to play how they want and for developers to enable it They aim to reach new, larger audiences and build, run and manage their games using best-in-class cloud tools and services. We built this in partnership with Azure, which reaches more people than any other cloud provider.
Since launching in 2020, we have seen tremendous growth: To date, more than 10 million people around the world have streamed games through Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
Today we reach another major milestone, expanding our business model to bring the cloud to more people in even more ways, and going beyond Xbox Game Pass to offer our first free-to-play title. In partnership with Epic, Fourteen days is available through Xbox Cloud Gaming So, fans can play through a web browser on an iOS device, Android phone or tablet, or Windows PC. This is just the beginning for us – we will learn, take feedback and try to bring even more free-to-play titles to players via the cloud over time.
Our continued growth and ability to enable new business models has been fueled by the way we have evolved the cloud to make it a part of the Xbox ecosystem. We started with Android running only on Xbox One S servers in our data centers. Since then, Cloud Gaming has been upgraded to Xbox Series X custom servers and launched on Windows PC, Apple phones and tablets, Xbox One and Xbox Series S|X, and we even got started roll it out on steam deck. We’ve also seen the community load it onto some unconventional devices via the browser, although it looks like they’re having a lot of fun. In total, player above all 26 countries have played on more than 6,000 types of devices, from different variants of Android phones to a range of PCs and iPhones of all generations.
We have also enabled cloud gaming in additional locations such as Mexico, Japan, Australia and Brazil. The gaming community has been phenomenal in all of these new countries, and Brazil in particular has exceeded our expectations. Adoption was so overwhelming in the first few weeks that fan demand exceeded our server capacity to the point that we had to quickly deploy more hardware to keep up with demand. The support we’ve seen in new countries, coupled with the delivery of more games to more devices, has produced encouraging results. Expect cloud gaming to be available in even more places in the coming months – we can’t wait to share more.
All of this wouldn’t be possible without great content. We are in the unique position of not only having a first-party cloud capable of delivering the games, but also a rich history in gaming, including expansive studios developing titles across all genres. Since launching less than two years ago, we’ve worked with over 125 developers to cloud-enable more than 350 games from the Xbox Game Pass catalog. We’ve also seen the power of the cloud as a discovery mechanism, reducing the time to easily try and play new games. On average, Xbox Game Pass players who use the cloud discover and play almost twice as many games as non-cloud Xbox Game Pass members
The way games are delivered to devices has also evolved – when we started all our games followed a lift and shift model to make it as easy as possible for studios to get games playable in the cloud do. With no code changes to make, games would just work on our cloud platform. This was a great way to build the catalog of hundreds of games, and many games play beautifully this way.
We’ve evolved over time and are also making it possible for games to be cloud-enabled; simple changes by the developer can improve the overall experience. You can add touch controls – either a simple overlay for fully custom controls like you see with Hades – or tweak the font size based on the device it’s streaming to. We introduced cloud gaming with a cloud-enabled game: Minecraft Dungeons with custom touch controls. There are now more than 150 cloud-enabled games with touchand we’ve found that games with touch controls result in more engagement. On average, we’re seeing a 2x increase in play for games with touch controls, and 20% of Xbox Cloud Gaming users use touch exclusively
Cloud-enabled titles also extend to more intense games, making it possible to play Gen 9 titles on Xbox One via the cloud. A good example of this is Microsoft Flight Simulator. It became available via the cloud on March 1st and was fast becoming the most played cloud game on phones, tablets, pc and consoles in the month of March. Players who would otherwise not have access to Gen 9 titles now have the opportunity to jump in on their own devices.
I will never forget the first time I played a console game powered by the cloud on my phone. It was just a magical experience. It has been many years since we have been on this cloud journey for some time along with a wonderful and engaged player community and incredible content partners. Together, we believe we have a bright future ahead of all gamers and developers.
