The future of gaming is a world where you are empowered to play the games you want, with the people you want, whenever you want, wherever you are, and on any device of your choosing. Our vision for the evolution of gaming is similar to music and movies — entertainment should be available on demand and accessible from any screen. Today, I’m excited to share with you one of our key projects that will take us on an accelerated journey to that future world: Project xCloud.
Today, the
games you play are very much dictated by the device you are using. Project
xCloud’s state-of-the-art global game-streaming technology will offer you the
freedom to play on the device you want without being locked to a particular
device, empowering YOU, the gamers, to be at the center of your gaming
experience.
Content and
community
Ultimately,
Project xCloud is about providing gamers — whether they prefer console or PC —
new choices in when and where they play, while giving mobile-only players
access to worlds, characters and immersive stories they haven’t been able
to experience before.
To realize
this vision, we know we must make it easy for developers to bring their content
to Project xCloud. Developers of the more than 3,000 games available on Xbox
One today, and those building the thousands that are coming in the future, will
be able to deploy and dramatically scale access to their games across all
devices on Project xCloud with no additional work.
About
Project xCloud
Scaling and building out Project
xCloud is a multi-year journey for us. We’ll begin public trials in 2019 so we
can learn and scale with different volumes and locations. Our focus is on
delivering an amazing added experience to existing Xbox players and on
empowering developers to scale to hundreds of millions of new players across
devices. Our goal with Project xCloud is to deliver a quality experience for
all gamers on all devices that’s consistent with the speed and high-fidelity gamers
experience and expect on their PCs and consoles.
We’ve
enabled compatibility with existing and future Xbox games by building out
custom hardware for our datacenters that leverages our years of console and
platform experience. We’ve architected a new customizable blade that can host
the component parts of multiple Xbox One consoles, as well as the associated
infrastructure supporting it. We will scale those custom blades in datacenters
across Azure regions over time.
We are
testing Project xCloud today. The test runs on devices (mobile phones, tablets)
paired with an Xbox Wireless Controller through Bluetooth, and it is also
playable using touch input. The immersive nature of console and PC games often
requires controls that are mapped to multiple keys, buttons, sticks and
triggers. We are developing a new, game-specific touch input overlay that
provides maximum response in a minimal footprint for players who choose to play
without a controller.
Cloud
game-streaming is a multi-faceted, complex challenge. Unlike other forms of
digital entertainment, games are interactive experiences that dynamically
change based on player input. Delivering a high-quality experience across a
variety of devices must account for different obstacles, such as low-latency video
streamed remotely, and support a large, multi-user network. In addition to
solving latency, other important considerations are supporting the graphical
fidelity and framerates that preserve the artist’s original intentions, and the
type of input a player has available.
Microsoft
— with our nearly 40 years of gaming experience starting with PC, as well as
our breadth and depth of capabilities from software to hardware and deep
experience of being a platform company — is well equipped to address the complex
challenge of cloud game-streaming. With datacenters in 54 Azure regions and
services available in 140 countries, Azure has the scale to deliver a great
gaming experience for players worldwide, regardless of their location.
Developers
and researchers at Microsoft Research are creating ways to combat latency
through advances in networking topology, and video encoding and decoding.
Project xCloud will have the capability to make game streaming possible on 4G
networks and will dynamically scale to push against the outer limits of what’s
possible on 5G networks as they roll out globally. Currently, the test
experience is running at 10 megabits per second. Our goal is to deliver
high-quality experiences at the lowest possible bitrate that work across the
widest possible networks, taking into consideration the uniqueness of every
device and network.
We are
looking forward to learning with you during our public trials next year and
sharing more details as we continue on this journey to the future of gaming
with you at the center. Stay tuned!
Thanx,
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Aussie Gamers Express
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