XCloud is never a 10/10 and is barely even free-tier worthy

It’s a bonus after all, and your experience varies depending on your ISP and location. I’ve never had great luck with it but I’ve heard many people say it worked flawlessly for them. Either way as a bullet time it’s alright, as a headlining feature it requires work, so it’s a good thing it’s the former and not the latter.

No matter how good your internet is it'll always depend on how close you are to the data centre, but even then console games are not designed for smart phones and smaller screens the user experience will vary greatly game to game.

XCloud will never be anything other than a bonus feature even when it works flawlessly, playing Gears/Halo at Starbucks doesn't really sell XCloud but playing on another TV in the house without needing to move your console is more apt.

The tech just isn't there yet. Even with great internet, honestly I'm wondering if it's just too late.

Theres so many electrical bouncing around the world now that congestion is just insane. Conceptually it's great and would be great for gaming as a whole, I just don't know if it's feasible.

They're treading in waters that make me think this will never ever work. Maybe they shouldn't be going so hard with the hardware agnostic vibe. This isn't good enough to convince someone like me, that is very forgiving. They should have gotten the thing to work on the xbox One edge browser first. Next gen without being next gen. Now that I've bought a Razer Kishi adapter for my phone i'm feeling bitter and a little burned. Like burned bridge get a Mac and PS5 kind of burned. Never buying domestic auto kind of burned.

I guess I don't understand what about this would make someone feel burned. Even if it's not very good it was never a real central point since it's still clearly in-progress. Did you really have to invest any money and effort into this? Did you not try it with a bluetooth controller first before buying an overpriced controller shell?

I gave it a try a few times, starting in the first beta wave. It's clearly gotten better (the series X hardware on the other side is really helping) but on a phone none of these streaming solutions feel any better than laggily controlling a 480p YouTube video. I'm not sure there's much of a way around that - games may need to be built with that in mind, much like how on a Switch you need a portable-readable UI. I really wouldn't categorize it as terrible though, just mediocre.

At the moment I don't have much use for this tech, since I already have a few fun phone games to play (solid indie titles get released at a good clip) and I own a Switch. But it could open up opportunities to play stuff I can't otherwise play. I don't have a console for Judgment so if they ever put that game on Game Pass I can stream-play it on my PC.

I don't have any experience with Xcloud, but i will say that Geforce Now has been pretty great for my situation where my GPU died. I was able to play hundreds of hours through the Witcher 3 because of it and 90% of the time it didn't feel like the tech was impeding my experience. That still means that there were times where i had to deal with some stutters or a loss of bitrate, but overall a service that made me feel like i was getting the true experience of the game i played. That said, i would never play competitive games through a streaming service.

I'm having a great time with it. I've been playing on my Galaxy Z Fold 3 in wifi from either my living room or a local coffee shop. I'm 70 hours into Yakuza 0 with very little issue. That being said, if you're gonna try something twitchy like Back 4 Blood, you're going to have a bad time (which is to be expected).

I'm suddenly interested, after reading this thread. Although it is in the GeForce Now.

If video cards get ridiculous, this may be an alternative to getting a console.

Maybe I live close to a data center or something but I've been
having a fairly good time playing random games of all genres on XCloud.
I had a weird hitch in specifically Nuts n Bolts every few minutes but otherwise it was responsive.

I remember initially trying Hollow Knight specifically because it's so demanding and it wasn't good but then several months later I tried again and while not 1:1 like on a console it was good enough to play. So maybe they are slowly but surely doing some adjusting behind the scenes all the time.

There needs to be a limit on the games that the system proffers when you have data connection. If i can only play pong sitting in traffic then tell me this.

So... from what i understand, you can only use streaming for "farming items and inventory management", it would be better if Xbox partnered with McDonalds like Nintendo for downloading things, but Starbucks because it means you'd go to Starbucks to download things, like you do on your phone?

@cikame: If i am at starbucks they can guarantee games like Halo Infinite can be played with a small hot caramel machiato. No lag a 10/10. They in their own testing have created an environment where these games run perfectly put those capabilities in place in the real world. They would affect my itinerary when i travel which affects the bottom line of any partners. Certain hotels. The Hilton guarantee the 3rd floor. Cross promotion. Right now there are zero guarantees. When you buy something there is a level of expectation. They know this thing doesnt work in the real world under a 5g signal.. i did buy a 5g phone for this so i forgot about that bitterness. This is just like the google employee that carries an iphone. Ive been duped.

Wait has the original post been deleted? Didn't know that could be done with the thread still intact.

Anyway seems like XCloud is still very much a work in progress which is good news for me since it's not available in my region yet. Hopefully by the time it is all the kinks will have been worked out.

huh interesting. The posts are gone from their profile as well.

Each time I check in, I notice marked improvements. In fact, I just booted it up yesterday for a bit to play some Darkest Dungeon. Given, that's the perfect game for cloud streaming with its turn-based nature, but I still found the input delay much improved since the last time I tried xCloud. I also noticed that some of the choppy audio issues and visual artifacts that I used to experience have gotten better as well. I don't know if this is random luck, or maybe a new data center was opened in the Northeast/Boston area or what. Either way, I'll be using xCloud more if it continues to work as well as it did for me this past weekend.

I've only tried it once, but it was definitely a less-than-perfect experience from my semi-rural area of middle-America. Of course, I was trying to play Hades, which has to be a tough one to get working on a cloud service. Maybe I'll give it a shot again sometime with a turn-based game. As has been said above, I'm fine with it not being perfect as long as it's an add-on to something like Game Pass which still amazes as a value proposition.

I have generally found Xcloud to work fairly well.

I used my Samsung tablet paired to a Xbox One controller to play Gears Tactics. I didn't encounter any issues during play. I also fired up Wreck Fest on the same tablet, and it played surprisingly well. I thought there might be some lag that would make driving impossible, however I did not notice any.