cloud gaming
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Microsoft plans to launch dedicated Xbox cloud gaming hardware
Microsoft will soon launch a dedicated device for game streaming, the company announced today. It’s also working with a number of TV manufacturers to build the Xbox experience right into their internet-connected screens and Microsoft plans to bring cloud gaming to the PC Xbox app later this year, too, with a focus on play-before-you-buy scenarios.
It’s unclear what these new game streaming devices will look like. Microsoft didn’t provide any further details. But chances are we’re talking about either a Chromecast-like streaming stick or a small Apple TV-like box. So far, we also don’t know which TV manufacturers it will partner with.
It’s no secret that Microsoft is bullish about cloud gaming. With Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, it’s already making it possible for its subscribers to play more than 100 console games on Android, streamed from the Azure cloud, for example. In a few weeks, it’ll open cloud gaming in the browser on Edge, Chrome and Safari, to all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers (it’s currently in limited beta). And it is bringing Game Pass Ultimate to Australia, Brazil, Mexico and Japan later this year, too.
In many ways, Microsoft is unbundling gaming from the hardware — similar to what Google is trying with Stadia (an effort that, so far, has fallen flat for Google) and Amazon with Luna. The major advantage Microsoft has here is a large library of popular games, something that’s mostly missing on competing services, with the exception of Nvidia’s GeForce Now platform — though that one has a different business model since its focus is not on a subscription but on allowing you to play the games you buy in third-party stores like Steam or the Epic store.
What Microsoft clearly wants to do is expand the overall Xbox ecosystem, even if that means it sells fewer dedicated high-powered consoles. The company likens this to the music industry’s transition to cloud-powered services backed by all-you-can-eat subscription models.
“We believe that games, that interactive entertainment, aren’t really about hardware and software. It’s not about pixels. It’s about people. Games bring people together,” said Microsoft’s Xbox head Phil Spencer. “Games build bridges and forge bonds, generating mutual empathy among people all over the world. Joy and community — that’s why we’re here.”
It’s worth noting that Microsoft says it’s not doing away with dedicated hardware, though, and is already working on the next generation of its console hardware — but don’t expect a new Xbox console anytime soon.
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Xbox Cloud Gaming beta starts rolling out on iOS and PC this week
The era of cloud gaming hasn’t arrived with the intensity that may have seemed imminent a couple years ago when major tech platforms announced their plays. In 2021, the market is still pretty much nonexistent despite established presences from nearly all of tech’s biggest players.
Microsoft has been slow to roll out its Xbox Cloud Gaming beta to its users widely across platforms, but that’s likely because they know that, unlike other upstart platforms, there’s not a huge advantage to them rushing out the gate first. This week, the company will begin rolling out the service on iOS and PC to Game Pass Ultimate users, sending out invites to a limited number of users and scaling it up over time.
“The limited beta is our time to test and learn; we’ll send out more invites on a continuous basis to players in all 22 supported countries, evaluate feedback, continue to improve the experience, and add support for more devices,” wrote Xbox’s Catherine Gluckstein in a blog post. “Our plan is to iterate quickly and open up to all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members in the coming months so more people have the opportunity to play Xbox in all-new ways.”
The service has been available in beta for Android users since last year but it’s been a slow expansion to other platforms outside that world.
A big part of that slowdown has been the result of Apple playing hardball with cloud gaming platform providers, whose business models represent a major threat to App Store gaming revenues. Apple announced a carve-out provision for cloud-gaming platforms that would maintain dependency on the App Store and in-app purchase frameworks but none of the providers seemed very happy with Apple’s solution. As a result, Xbox Cloud Gaming will operate entirely through the web on iOS inside mobile Safari.
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Nvidia raises GeForce Now subscription plan to $10 per month
Nvidia’s cloud gaming service GeForce Now has announced some changes when it comes to subscription plans. Starting today, paid memberships now cost $9.99 per month, or $99.99 per year — they are now called “Priority” memberships.
If you’re an existing “Founders” member, you’ll keep the same subscription price as long as you remain a subscriber. If you stop your subscription at any point, you won’t be able to pay $5 per month again.
Last year, when Nvidia originally introduced paid plans for GeForce Now, the company was pretty transparent with its user base. You could pay $4.99 per month to access the Founders edition, but the company was going to raise the subscription fee at some point. And it sounds like Nvidia has made up its mind and thinks the paid subscription is worth $9.99 per month.
If you’re not familiar with GeForce Now, it lets you start a game on a powerful gaming PC in a data center near you. You get a video stream on your computer, mobile phone, tablet or TV of the game running in a data center — GeForce Now uses a web app on iOS and iPadOS and is available on a limited number of Android TV devices. When you press a button on your controller, the action is relayed to the server so you can interact with the game. All of this happens in tens of milliseconds, making it one of the smoothest cloud gaming experiences available right now.
Compared to Google Stadia and Amazon Luna, Nvidia isn’t starting its own game store. GeForce Now customers launch games they already own. The platform supports Steam, Epic Games, GOG.com and Ubisoft’s launcher.
Game publishers have to opt in to GeForce Now, which means that you can’t launch all your games that you own in your Steam library. Right now, GeForce Now supports around 800 games that you can find on this page.
If you want to try GeForce Now, you can start playing for free. Nvidia offers a free membership that should be considered as a free trial. First, you have to wait in a queue until a free server is available — it can take five, 10 or 15 minutes.
After that, you’re limited to one-hour sessions. When you’ve played for an hour, you’re kicked out of the server. You can still start the game again, but you’ll have to go through the queue one more time.
If you become a paid member, games start nearly instantly and you can play up to six hours at a time. Similarly, you can start the game instantly after your six hours are up. Paid members also get RTX-enabled graphics.
When it comes to specifications, Nvidia has several configurations with different CPUs, graphic cards and RAM. If you play Fortnite, you might not get the best rig as you can get very high graphics on a medium-range PC. But if you launch Cyberpunk 2077, the service tries to prioritize better rigs.
Nvidia says it has attracted nearly 10 million users for its cloud gaming service. It’s unclear how many of them are paying for a subscription.
The company doubled the number of data centers in the last year. There are now more than 20 data centers operated by Nvidia or local partners. The company plans to expand capacity in existing data centers, and add new data centers in Phoenix, Montreal and Australia.
There will be some quality-of-life updates as well, such as the ability to link games with your account to make it easier to launch them and more aggressive preloading of games.
Image Credits: Nvidia
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Google Stadia is now available on iOS
A few weeks after announcing that iOS support was on the way, Google’s cloud gaming service now supports the iPhone and iPad. As expected, the company is using a web app to access the service. Google also says that you need to update to iOS 14.3, the latest iOS update that was released earlier this week.
If you want to try it out with a free or paid Stadia account, you can head over to stadia.google.com from your iOS device. Log in to your Google account, add a shortcut to your home screen and open the web app.
After that, you can launch a game and start playing. Most games will require a gamepad, so you might want to pair a gamepad with your iPhone or iPad as well.
Apple’s iOS supports Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers using Bluetooth as well as controllers specifically designed for iOS. You can also play with the Stadia controller, but it’s optional. If you just want to check your inventory quickly, Stadia on iOS also supports touch controls.
Stadia works a bit like a console that runs in the cloud. You have to buy games for the platform specifically and you can then stream them from a data center near you. Recent additions include Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
While you don’t have to pay an additional subscription to play those games, you can optionally become a Stadia Pro subscriber. In addition to games you bought on the platform, it lets you access a library of games and it unlocks 4K video. Stadia Pro costs $9.99 per month.
In other Stadia news, earlier this week, Ubisoft announced that you could subscribe to the company’s unlimited subscription service Ubisoft+ and access games from Stadia. For now, it’s only available as a beta in the U.S.
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Cloud-gaming platforms were 2020’s most overhyped trend
It was an unprecedented year for [insert anything under the sun], and while plenty of tech verticals saw shifts that warped business models and shifted user habits, the gaming industry experienced plenty of new ideas in 2020. However, the loudest trends don’t always take hold as predicted.
This year, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon each leaned hard into new cloud-streaming tech that shifts game processing and computing to cloud-based servers, allowing users to play graphics-intensive content on low-powered systems or play titles without dealing with lengthy downloads.
It was heralded by executives as a tectonic shift for gaming, one that would democratize access to the next generation of titles. But in taking a closer look at the products built around this tech, it’s hard to see a future where any of these subscription services succeed.
Massive year-over-year changes in gaming are rare because even if a historically unique platform launches or is unveiled, it takes time for a critical mass of developers to congregate and adopt something new — and longer for users to coalesce. As a result, even in a year where major console makers launch historically powerful hardware, massive tech giants pump cash into new cloud-streaming tech and gamers log more hours collectively than ever before, it can feel like not much has shifted.
That said, the gaming industry did push boundaries in 2020, though it’s unclear where meaningful ground was gained. The most ambitious drives were toward redesigning marketplaces in the image of video streaming networks, aiming to make a more coordinated move toward driving subscription growth and moving farther away from an industry defined for decades by one-time purchases structured around single-player storylines, one dramatically shaped by internet networking and instantaneous payments infrastructure software.
Today’s products are far from dead ends for what the broader industry does with the technology.
But shifting gamers farther away from one-off purchases wasn’t even the gaming industry’s most fundamental reconsideration of the year, a space reserved for a coordinated move by the world’s richest companies to upend the console wars with an invisible competitor. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the most full-featured plays in this arena are coming from the cloud services triumvirate, with Google, Microsoft and Amazon each making significant strides in recent months.
The driving force for this change is both the maturation of virtual desktop streaming and continued developer movement toward online cross-play between gaming platforms, a trend long resisted by legacy platform owners intent on maintaining siloed network effects that pushed gamers toward buying the same consoles that their friends owned.
The cross-play trend reached a fever pitch in recent years as entities like Epic Games’ Fortnite developed massive user bases that gave developers exceptional influence over the deals they struck with platform owners.
While a trend toward deeper cross-play planted the seeds for new corporate players in the gaming world, it has been the tech companies with the deepest pockets that have pioneered the most concerted plays to side-load a third-party candidate into the console wars.
It’s already clear to plenty of gamers that even in their nascent stages, cloud-gaming platforms aren’t meeting up to their hype and standalone efforts aren’t technologically stunning enough to make up for the apparent lack of selection in the content libraries.
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Nvidia reportedly bringing Fortnite back to iOS through its cloud gaming service
The British news service is reporting that Nvidia has developed a version of its GeForce cloud gaming service that runs on Safari.
The development means that Fortnite gamers can play the Epic Games title off of servers run by Nvidia. What’s not clear is whether the cloud gaming service will mean significant lag times for players that could effect their gameplay.
Apple customers have been unable to download new versions of Epic Games’ marquee title after the North Carolina-based company circumvented Apple’s rules around in-game payments.
Revenues and rules are at the center of the conflict between Epic and Apple. Epic had developed an in-game marketplace where transactions were not subject to the 30% charges that Apple places on transactions conducted through its platform.
The maneuver was a clear violation of Apple’s terms of service, but Epic is arguing that the rules themselves are unfair and an example of Apple’s monopolistic hold over distribution of applications on its platform.
The ongoing legal dispute won’t even see the inside of a courtroom until May and it could be years before the lawsuit is resolved.
That’s going to create a lot of hassles for the nearly 116 million iOS Fortnite players, especially for the 73 million players that only use Apple products to access the game, according to the BBC report.
Unlike Android, Apple does not allow games or other apps to be loaded on to its phones or tablets via app stores other than its own.
Nvidia already offers its GeForce gaming service for Mac, Windows, Android and Chromebook computers, but the new version will be available on Apple mobile devices as well, according to the BBC report.
If it moves ahead, Nvidia’s cloud gaming service would be the only one on the market to support iOS users. Neither Amazon’s Luna cloud-gaming platform nor Google’s Stadia service carry Fortnite.
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Facebook steps into cloud gaming — and another feud with Apple
Facebook will soon be the latest tech giant to enter the world of cloud gaming. Their approach is different than what Microsoft or Google has built, but Facebook highlights a shared central challenge: dealing with Apple.
Facebook is not building a console gaming competitor to compete with Stadia or xCloud; instead, the focus is wholly on mobile games. Why cloud stream mobile games that your device is already capable of running locally? Facebook is aiming to get users into games more quickly and put less friction between a user seeing an advertisement for a game and actually playing it themselves. Users can quickly tap into the title without downloading anything, and if they eventually opt to download the title from a mobile app store, they’ll be able to pick up where they left off.
Facebook’s service will launch on the desktop web and Android, but not iOS due to what Facebook frames as usability restrictions outlined in Apple’s App Store terms and conditions.
With the new platform, users will be able to start playing mobile games directly from Facebook ads. Image via Facebook.
While Apple has suffered an onslaught of criticism in 2020 from developers of major apps like Spotify, Tinder and Fortnite for how much money they take as a cut from revenues of apps downloaded from the App Store, the plights of companies aiming to build cloud gaming platforms have been more nuanced and are tied to how those platforms are fundamentally allowed to operate on Apple devices.
Apple was initially slow to provide a path forward for cloud gaming apps from Google and Microsoft, which had previously been outlawed on the App Store. The iPhone maker recently updated its policies to allow these apps to exist, but in a more convoluted capacity than the platform makers had hoped, forcing them to first send users to the App Store before being able to cloud stream a gaming title on their platform.
For a user downloading a lengthy single-player console epic, the short pitstop is an inconvenience, but long-time Facebook gaming exec Jason Rubin says that the stipulations are a non-starter for what Facebook’s platform envisions, a way to start playing mobile games immediately without downloading anything.
“It’s a sequence of hurdles that altogether make a bad consumer experience,” Rubin tells TechCrunch.
Apple tells TechCrunch that they have continued to engage with Facebook on bringing its gaming efforts under its guidelines and that platforms can reach iOS by either submitting each individual game to the App Store for review or operating their service on Safari.
In terms of building the new platform onto the mobile web, Rubin says that without being able to point users of their iOS app to browser-based experiences, as current rules forbid, Facebook doesn’t see pushing its billions of users to accessing the service primarily from a browser as a reasonable alternative. In a Zoom call, Rubin demonstrates how this could operate on iOS, with users tapping an advertisement inside the app and being redirected to a game experience in mobile Safari.
“But if I click on that, I can’t go to the web. Apple says, ‘No, no, no, no, no, you can’t do that,’ ” Rubin tells us. “Apple may say that it’s a free and open web, but what you can actually build on that web is dictated by what they decide to put in their core functionality.”
Facebook VP of Play Jason Rubin. Image via Facebook.
Rubin, who co-founded the game development studio Naughty Dog in 1994 before it was acquired by Sony in 2001, has been at Facebook since he joined Oculus months after its 2014 acquisition was announced. Rubin had previously been tasked with managing the games ecosystem for its virtual reality headsets; this year he was put in charge of the company’s gaming initiatives across their core family of apps as the company’s VP of Play.
Rubin, well familiar with game developer/platform skirmishes, was quick to distinguish the bone Facebook had to pick with Apple and complaints from those like Epic Games, which sued Apple this summer.
“I do want to put a pin in the fact that we’re giving Google 30% [on Android]. The Apple issue is not about money,” Rubin tells TechCrunch. “We can talk about whether or not it’s fair that Google takes that 30%. But we would be willing to give Apple the 30% right now, if they would just let consumers have the opportunity to do what we’re offering here.”
Facebook is notably also taking a 30% cut of transaction within these games, even as Facebook’s executive team has taken its own shots at Apple’s steep revenue fee in the past, most recently criticizing how Apple’s App Store model was hurting small businesses during the pandemic. This saga eventually led to Apple announcing that it would withhold its cut through the end of the year for ticket sales of small businesses hosting online events.
Apple’s reticence to allow major gaming platforms a path toward independently serving up games to consumers underscores the significant portion of App Store revenues that could be eliminated by a consumer shift toward these cloud platforms. Apple earned around $50 billion from the App Store last year, CNBC estimates, and gaming has long been their most profitable vertical.
Though Facebook is framing this as an uphill battle against a major platform for the good of the gamer, this is hardly a battle between two underdogs. Facebook pulled in nearly $70 billion in ad revenues last year, and improving their offerings for mobile game studios could be a meaningful step toward increasing that number, something Apple’s App Store rules threaten.
For the time being, Facebook is keeping this launch pretty conservative. There are just 5-10 titles that are going to be available at launch, Rubin says. Facebook is rolling out access to the new service, which is free, this week across a handful of states in America, including California, Texas, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia and West Virginia. The hodge-podge nature of the geographic rollout is owed to the technical limitations of cloud-gaming — people have to be close to data centers where the service has rolled out in order to have a usable experience. Facebook is aiming to scale to the rest of the U.S. in the coming months, they say.
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Cloud gaming platform Shadow gets a new CEO and CTO
There are some changes at the helm of Blade, the French startup behind Shadow. Mike Fischer is going to work for the company and become chief executive officer. Jean-Baptiste Kempf is joining the company as chief technology officer.
Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. For a monthly subscription fee, you can access a gaming PC in a data center near you. Compared to other cloud gaming services, such as GeForce Now or Google’s Stadia, Shadow provides a full Windows 10 instance. You can install anything you want — Steam, Photoshop or Word.
The company has been growing rapidly over the past few years and raised more than $100 million in total. Last year, the company announced ambitious plans, with a wide-ranging partnership with OVHcloud and high-end configurations.
At the same time, co-founder Emmanuel Freund stepped aside as CEO, with Jérôme Arnaud taking over. There have been multiple delays with the new product offering and the company is no longer working with OVHcloud. Freund left the company in April and, as INpact Hardware reported in July, Arnaud has been on the way out for a couple of months.
All of this leads us to today’s announcement. Mike Fischer, the company’s new CEO, has been quite active in the video game industry. In the past, he has worked at Sega, Bandai Namco, Microsoft and Epic Games. He was the president and CEO of Square Enix between 2010 and 2013.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf is a well-known figure in the open-source community. For the past 14 years, he has been the president of VideoLAN, the organization behind popular media player VLC. VideoLAN has also contributed to widely used video encoding technologies. He also founded VideoLabs, a company that works on VLC-related integrations and support.
The company is still working on rolling out the new Ultra and Infinite configurations to European users who pre-ordered. It originally planned to start rolling out new tiers in the U.S. starting this summer but the company now says it expects to launch these new tiers by the end of the year.
For customers in the U.S., there are no pre-orders, there will simply be a button to upgrade in your account when it’s available. LG invested in the company earlier this year and the service will go live in South Korea later this year, as well.
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Google Stadia is now free for everyone, with a two-month trial for Pro tier
Google’s game-streaming service Stadia is now free for anyone with a Gmail account, the company announced today. Assuming you’ve got a compatible device and controller — and good internet in one of the 14 supported countries — you can sign up right now and get the “Pro” edition with a handful of built-in games for two months.
Until today, Stadia was only available via a $129 “Premiere Edition” that came with a controller, though a free “Base” version has been long promised. In a blog post, the company explained that the intense pressures of the pandemic led them to finally open up the service.
“We’re facing some of the most challenging times in recent memory. Video games can be a valuable way to socialize with friends and family when you’re stuck at home, so we’re giving gamers in 14 countries free access to Stadia for two months,” writes Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison.
Although the post makes no mention of a permanent free Base tier, a Google representative confirmed that it exists and players signing up today will be able to switch to it if they decide not to pay for Pro after two months. It’s limited to 1080p, 60 frames per second, and stereo (versus surround) sound.
Existing subscribers, who have been vocally critical of the bare-bones nature of the service they paid a premium to access, will not be charged for the next two months. Also, in order to cope with what will no doubt be a flood of demand, Stadia will be defaulting everyone’s streams to 1080p, though you’ll be able to change that in your preferences. That’s interesting, considering YouTube just downgraded its quality worldwide to lower overall bandwidth usage.
For now, though, it won’t do to look a gift horse in the mouth. Stadia is a solid way to play games on a PC, or TV or device that would normally not be able to do so — an underpowered laptop, for instance. Streaming to your phone or tablet is also an option.
On supported Android devices you’ll need to download the app; on computers, you’ll need Chrome; and for a TV you need a Chromecast Ultra — the regular one won’t cut it. You can’t play games on iOS yet, unfortunately.
You have to provide your own controller if you’re not using a keyboard and mouse; a list of compatible ones (and phones) is available here, and while Google’s own Stadia controller is the only one that works with Chromecast, the controllers for the other major consoles generally work for Chrome and Android phones.
As for games, well, that part’s a bit confusing. You’ll be getting access to the Stadia Pro tier of membership, which gets at least free game every month to keep, like Xbox Games with Gold and PlayStation Plus. Right now, though, that only amounts to nine titles, though some are pretty great — Destiny 2, SteamWorld Dig 2, GRID and a few more.
On either a Pro or free account, if you want to play other games like Borderlands 3 or Rise of the Tomb Raider, you’ll have to buy them on the Stadia marketplace. The games are then only available to stream through Stadia, not to run natively on your PC, so if you ever left the service you would lose access to them (a “license not buy” situation common on digital platforms, but especially pronounced on streaming ones). There are 38 games available to buy total, and yes, that number is pretty low. Google is “tracking” 120 more to arrive this year, but the lack of games has been a serious issue for existing subscribers.
So far Stadia has yet to prove itself a worthwhile investment for gamers, though for some obviously it’s a dream come true. SensorTower put downloads of the app at about 750,000, which is nothing to sniff at — but it’s far from the number of installations of popular games services like Steam.
That said, free trial will help potential subscribers decide if the service is for them, with zero risk. You can sign up for your free trial via the main Stadia site here; the company has said it is in the middle of rolling out the feature, so check back if it isn’t there yet.
And here are the countries in which it is currently available:
- United States
- Canada
- United Kingdom
- Ireland
- France
- Germany
- Italy
- Spain
- Netherlands
- Belgium
- Denmark
- Sweden
- Norway
- Finland
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Game downloads will be throttled to manage internet congestion
For the billions stuck at home during the global effort to flatten the curve, gaming is a welcome escape. But it’s also a bandwidth-heavy one, and Microsoft, Sony and others are working to make sure that millions of people downloading enormous games don’t suck up all the bandwidth. Don’t worry, though, it won’t affect your ping.
A blog post by content delivery network Akamai explained a few things it is doing to help mitigate the tidal wave of traffic that the internet’s infrastructure is experiencing. Although streaming video is of course a major contributor, games are a huge, if more intermittent, burden on the network.
Akamai is “working with leading distributors of software, particularly for the gaming industry, including Microsoft and Sony, to help manage congestion during peak usage periods. This is very important for gaming software downloads, which account for large amounts of internet traffic when an update is released,” the post reads.
Take the new “Call of Duty: Warzone” battle royale game, released last week for free and seeing major engagement. If you didn’t already own the latest CoD title, Warzone was a more than 80-gigabyte download, equivalent to dozens of movies on Netflix . And what’s more, that 80 gigs was likely downloaded at the maximum bandwidth home connections provided; streaming video is limited to a handful of megabits over the duration of the media, nowhere close to saturating your connection.
And Warzone isn’t alone — there are tons of high-profile games being released at a time when many people have nothing to do but sit at home and play games — PC game platform Steam posted a record 20 million concurrent players the other day, and one analysis saw a 400% increase in gaming traffic. So gaming is bigger than ever, while games are bigger than ever themselves.
As a result, gaming downloads will be throttled for the foreseeable future, at least in some markets. “Players may experience somewhat slower or delayed game downloads,” wrote Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan in a brief blog post. I’ve asked Microsoft, Nintendo and Valve for comment on their approach as well.
It’s important to note that this should not apply to the rest of the gaming experience. Unlike downloading games, playing games is a remarkably low-bandwidth task — it’s important for packets to be traded quickly so players are in sync, but there aren’t a lot of them compared with even a low-resolution streaming video.
The best thing to do is to set your games to be downloaded overnight, as local infrastructure will be less taxed while everyone in your region is asleep. If you have downloads or updates coming during the day, don’t be surprised if they take longer than usual or are queued elsewhere.
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