Despite the expectation of bright, shiny and expensive new consoles coming our way later this year, Microsoft still has their heads tilted towards the cloud and believes that cloud gaming is the future. The company is getting ready to launch its xCloud game streaming service in a few months, which will help usher in their take on cloud gaming that should hopefully provide the first real option in this area after Google’s Stadia has so far proven to be a massive disappointment.
The service will initially be powered by Xbox One S consoles in server blades in Microsoft’s datacentres, but with a new console generation on the horizon The Verge has revealed that Microsoft will be planning an upgrade of this hardware next year with Microsoft also experimenting with dedicated PC server blades for streaming PC games over xCloud.
The Xbox Series X hardware will already provide a big boost even if it is only streaming Xbox One and older era titles as the next-gen processor is capable of running four Xbox One S game sessions simultaneously. It also includes a new built-in video encoder that is up to six times faster than the current encoder that Microsoft uses on existing xCloud servers.
With Microsoft experimenting with PC Server blades to do the heavy lifting of the game processing, it’s also likely that we could see the company eventually streaming PC-only games to the service at some point in time too. The company is reportedly still on track to launch the service later this year on Android mobile devices, although Microsoft is not ready to release xCloud on Apple due to some ongoing app store restrictions at the moment.
There is also no word on exactly where these new Cloud servers will be based, because the only way this service could work successfully in South Africa is through local datacentres. Unless you somehow don’t mind really bad latency in your gaming experiences. Microsoft does appear serious about their cloud gaming plans though and with that and a new console on the horizon, they could potentially offer quite an exciting amount of play experiences for gamers.
Last Updated: June 22, 2020
CodeDisQus
June 22, 2020 at 15:20
This is good! VERY GOOD!
Hoping that local data-centres happen soon, although the question of good internet is still around
Atif Shahab Qureshi
June 23, 2020 at 13:52
I think location of data centers is extremely important and a company like Microsoft would be well aware of it. Cloud hosting providers like Hostnoc have data centers in all over the world including USA, Canada and Germany