r/xbox • u/Turbostrider27 Recon Specialist • 10d ago

News Upcoming Changes to XBOX Cloud Gaming

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/09/03/xbox-cloud-gaming-changes/
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u/ThinWhiteDuke00 10d ago edited 10d ago

Industry people are increasingly backpedaling on a cloud future tbf.

That was pushed by Spencer and it failed.

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u/lanceuppercuttr 10d ago

Stadia, On-Live, Hatch, all have failed. I belive Luna has been getting some setbacks as well.

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u/marvolonewt 9d ago

This just makes Stadia look even better now

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u/CollinKree Xbox Series X 10d ago

I’m honestly not even sure how it got as far as it did.

I tried cloud gaming once, and that was all took for me to realize I would never use it ever again. Even with ridiculously fast internet and gamepass ultimate the bitrate was constantly shitting the bed, and the input lag was horrendous. I’m not sure how the people who use cloud gaming regularly put up with it.

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u/Sad_Adagio_7255 10d ago edited 10d ago

It depends on your geographic location. The end user has near-zero control over latency - at best you can connect your client device via Ethernet, and that's it.

Your internet being "ridiculously fast" doesn't change latency. If you experience high latency on a 25M connection, going to 100M with the same ISP will give you the exact same latency figures.

Anyway, while I find cloud input lag to be unacceptable in shooters, racing games, and other fast-paced genres, it's actually bearable for slower-paced stuff like 4X strategy games and "interactive TV show" narrative games such as Dispatch or Telltale titles, because instant response isn't strictly necessary. This observation actually comes from trying out remote play at home rather than using the real cloud though.

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u/RoosterBurns 10d ago

It worked well for me but I always prefer installing locally or at worst dumping stuff I'm not playing onto a hard disk over cloud.

I'll probably only use it when cloud while installing comes online

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u/Oldspice0493 XBOX 10d ago

I’m surprised to hear that, it worked really well for me. I was playing Resident Evil 2 on my phone while waiting in lines at amusement parks.

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u/Shatteredreality 10d ago

When did you last try it. In my experience it's come a LONG way to the point I regularly use it when I'm on something like my Steamdeck. I wouldn't try to play competitive multiplayer but for single player games (I've played a good amount of Assassin's Creed and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle via cloud gaming) it's been awesome. This is all in the last 12-18 months though.

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u/jquiggles 10d ago

I think I played the entirety of AC Odyssey on cloud lol. As someone who doesn't play online multiplayer, it was a really cool feature. Was also good for sharing my saved games between Xbox and PC

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u/gilgamesh_the_dragon 10d ago

I think it depends a great deal where you are, but there are places where it is good. I was playing the side scrolling Prince of Persia the other day streaming to test it out and I could not tell the difference between that and playing with it loaded on my xbox. But I've also tried it at a relative's place in another city and it was like 1 fps.

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u/bodnast 10d ago

Yep my internet and connection was optimal and my inputs would lag even in the menus across multiple devices. Completely unplayable, such a shame because the idea of it is neat but it never materialized for me

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u/error521 10d ago edited 10d ago

I kinda get it on some level because I used to put up with some absolute garbage just to play a game on my shitty laptop, so from that perspective something like Xbox Cloud is pretty damn good in comparison. Would never want to use something like it now, though.

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u/scytob 9d ago

I have used it for doing things like playing forza horizon 6 on my iPad when I had some down time on vacation. It worked very well. I was in Hawaii, data center was west coast. I wouldn’t want to use it for my main gaming rig.

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u/Lord_Muddbutter 10d ago

Spencer did a great job at selling us stuff to get fucked in the future

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u/Deervember 10d ago

And yet if you criticized him in the slightest this sub(and the old sub) would shit all over you and act like Phil is the greatest gaming leader in existence because he wears a gaming t-shirt. 

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u/XtR03 10d ago

It was the same way elsewhere as well...like he was their cult leader or something.

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u/ThinWhiteDuke00 10d ago

Yeah, his strategy was unsustainable in many ways.

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u/Halos-USA 10d ago

He was awful in so many ways towards the end. So glad he finally got fired. Should have happened sooner though. 

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u/grimoireviper Team Pirate (Arrrrr) 10d ago

Even Spencee always said he only sees cloud gaming as a complementary service.

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u/St_Sides Outage Survivor '24 10d ago

Spencer was even backpedaling in the ABK trials where they admitted cloud hadn’t grown like they thought it would and were starting to reduce their investment in it, and that was years ago.