Hey guys, I haven't really seen any news about this and just found out about it yesterday: if you have Game Pass Ultimate you can just go to xbox.com/play and play their cloud games on PC!

This was an awesome surprise for me, so I thought I'd share the news.

I'm playing Fable 2 now, a game which I thought I would never get a chance to play...

@newhaap: hows the latency been for you with fable? Ive been playing mostly MLB The Show and its been pretty good actually. But when I loaded into fable the latency was definitely noticeable, however it might be because I loaded into an end game save which is always a bit laggy.

I've tried it a bit on both iOS and PC and it's been a mixed bag. I get 400 down on my cable and have a 5GHZ router. The Master Chief Collection has run like crap even over a wired connection, but Gears 5 ran excellently over 3 bars of LTE on my phone. Betas!

@xanadu: Good question, yeah I do really feel the latency with Fable 2. But it's something I'm willing to live with since I've been really curious to play it :)

I tried playing Sea of Thieves and it felt much better. I guess I should play other games I'm more familiar with too to compare how they play.

@banefirelord: Yeah weird, I admit I don't understand how the tech works. I wonder if they have to tweak individual games to make them work well on streaming

My laptop doesn't have an ethernet port on it, and my wifi is pretty iffy in regards getting a stable feed when I tried playing MLB that way. So streaming doesn't make a whole lot of sense for me personally, especially when I have a Series S already. So instead, I've been trying to access it through various console web browsers. Just to see if I can go "Look at me! On playing an Xbox on a Playstation!". Haven't found one that it works on though. Not even on the Series S itself. But I haven't tried the Wii U yet. Fingers crossed!

Sounds like a nice addition but I guess not a huge suprise considering how much they have pushed their services for consumers recently.

As a PC and non-Windows user/gamer I of course would like to see them supporting other operating systems than Windows as well. It is Microsoft so expectations are extremely low but there is still a change for huge surprise.

edit: Stadia has worked pretty much perfectly for me. I haven't yet come across a game which has had problems because of latency or other issues.

I've tried cloud streaming on PC a couple of times now, both right after it first went into limited beta and then again a couple of days ago with the announcement that the streaming hardware on Microsoft's end had been upgraded to Series X specs. The controller input lag is still not to a level I would call a good experience. Every time I try it I end up just holding my controller in front of the monitor and flicking the sticks to time the delay between controller input and screen movement. Game streaming is an awesome concept, but running games locally is superior in every way to Xbox Cloud right now. This is on a 400/20 fully wired connection through a Mikrotik 4 core router.

I tried but my internet is so terrible I couldn't even get through the menu on state of decay 2. I knew this, so I'm not mad. my peak download speeds are 3.4Mbps (or MB/s? I get confused by whether it's display bytes or bits) so there's no way it would be good.

I played all of Orcs Must Die 3 on stadia and it was an awful experience that would boot me out of the game mid mission, but it was more playable than this. If you've got good internet, give it a shot.

So I wound up grabbing a Razer Kishi during Prime Day, mostly for inhome streaming from my local consoles and Steam library when my partner’s using the TV, and now that it’s finally arrived I’ve been futzing around with XCloud. I haven’t done much yet, since I’m now waiting for a dongle to arrive that will let me use my phone with the Kishi without taking off the case every time, but I gotta say it’s pretty surreal and awesome playing my original 360 Oblivion save from 2008 on my iPhone. Even if the tech feels creaky at best at the moment, Microsoft definitely seems to be taking the right approach with XCloud as a supplement to its broader ecosystem, rather than the be all, end all.

However, my biggest gripe apart from the tech issues is that XCloud is based on the console versions rather than the PC versions of games, which is really annoying when it comes to the save ecosystem. My PC’s more powerful than my One X, so I have a lot of PC progress in a swath of games that are on both console and PC Game Pass that I now can’t access over XCloud. I hope Microsoft figures out a way to add Play Anywhere progression to more of its library in the future.

I played Viva Pinata on my work PC. This is the future.

The Razer Kishi on my iPhone doesn't seem to work with xCloud, which sucks. So I just go back to playing Genshin. I'm not going to mount my Xbox controller to my phone.

This is quite cool but is pretty hit and miss right now. I played a few games that ran perfectly and had minimal latency (State of Decay 2, Banjo-Kazooie, a couple others) but anything sufficiently fast-moving or latency-sensitive like Forza Horizon 4 is not nearly as good. I had almost constant audio clipping in Forza Horizon 4 along with what felt like a quarter second of latency. I'm on a wired gigabit down/100 megabit up connection so I was surprised to see these issues in some games but not others.

It's definitely a promising tech though. I'm excited to see how good it is in say two or three years from now once all of the issues are ironed out.