Internal emails disclosed in the FTC case against Microsoft for its acquisition of Activision Blizzard revealed that the software giant was (is) working on a cloud-based game streaming service for PC through Xbox Cloud Gaming and using Azure servers. It was a response to the threat from Google Stadia.
To put the news in context, we’ll say that Microsoft already has the Xbox Cloud Gaming streaming and cloud gaming service on the market as part of its Xbox Game Pass Unlimited service. But it’s limited to Xbox games, as the service uses the company’s dedicated hardware version of the Xbox Series X.
This has been expected for a long time Microsoft is expanding it to computer games, but we haven’t had any news about it in recent months. affairs. When that didn’t work out, the company reached agreements with other cloud computing platforms, certainly forced by competitors and regulators to give the go-ahead to buy the Activision group. But the matter was and remains on the table.
PC Games on Xbox Cloud Gaming
It was July 2021 when Microsoft boss Satya Nadella sent an email to Xbox boss Phil Spencer, Karim Choudhary, Microsoft’s head of cloud gaming, and Sarah Bond, Xbox’s director of creator experience, after rumors surfaced that Google intended turn Stadia into a white label cloud gaming service for developers to run games on the platform.
“It looks like they’ll have an advantage because they’re more generic Linux + network VMs… But I guess we’ll do the same with Game Pass for PC, right?”Nadella asked. Spencer quickly responded to give his opinion on Stadia and confirm it Microsoft has been working on a solution from Azure for streaming native PC games from the cloud.
“Google has the ability to reuse their Linux-based cloud hardware, and yes, when we stream native PC games with Azure GPU SKUs, we’ll have more reuse scenarios to offset the costs.”Spencer said with an eye toward offering a “white-label” solution similar to Stadia, a cloud-based gaming service for developers and publishers.
“Phil is right,” said Microsoft’s director of cloud gaming. “We’re promoting the corresponding Azure SKU… as part of a series that will meet the customer demand we’re seeing externally for IAAS and also to launch our xCloud streaming stack for PC“. This is the first time we know of confirmation by Microsoft executives of running PC games on the Xbox Cloud Gaming service.
And if it’s still not available, it might be because of the Google Stadia fiasco, as Phil Spencer predicted in the same email thread. “Honestly, I think Google is trying to turn Stadia into a Google Cloud SKU and eliminate its first-party consumer service. Google is a big and aggressive competitor, but I’ve honestly been surprised by the lack of progress on Stadia. Until the date our number one competitor here is NVIDIA with GeForce Now. But we’re keeping a close eye on Google and Amazon with Luna (which is also struggling).”.
Spencer got it right. Just a year and a half after those letters, Google shut down Stadia. Microsoft still isn’t expanding its cloud service as many of us expect, but we think it’s only a matter of time.
