Microsoft is playing a very patient game with the future of Xbox

The era of subscription-based cloud gaming is nearly upon us and Microsoft has the best blueprint for the future. Microsoft will let players use their own Xbox as a cloud gaming device for free using Microsoft's streaming technology Project xCloud.

[yarbie1000]

Very very patient...so patient that they've basically taken off the last 5 years when it comes to new AAA exclusives

[lxeasy]

I'd rather they be patient and release amazing games than they be hurry their devs and release mediocre games.

[Silly gameAr]

Since when has that been Mircosoft's MO? What amazing games have MS devs released so far that you were patiently waiting for?

[TK-66]

@Silly gameAR

MCC, Gears 4, Forza: Horizon 4 and maybe Ori if you want to count it. MS have a lot of work to do to improve but don't pretend they've made nothing good this gen.

[xX-oldboy-Xx]

Ixeasy - The patience with Crackdown 3 shone brilliantly - keep up the good work ms. They don't care about any of that, subs is all they want. THAT'S IT.

[Razmiran]

Ori was not made under MS
They bought thr studio later

[WelkinCole]

Oh like Crackdown and Sea of Thieves?

[rdgneoz3]

@Tl Ori was from an indie studio when it was first released and MCC is xbox/360 games with updated graphics... So you've basically got another gears and another forza this gen. Even Crackdown 3 multiplayer is dead with all the toting of the cloud power...

[yomfweeee]

Ya, how'd that work out for Crackdown 3, Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2?

[Sophisticated_Chap]

If your a fan of Halo, Gears, Forza Horizon and Forza Motorsport, then you're liking what Microsoft has been putting out this generation. Not every gamer is interested in every single PlayStation exclusive game. I personally don't care about the vast majority of PS exclusive games, simply because they are not the kinds of games I like to play.

Some of the games that made me a fan of Sony's, was Resistance, Socom, Motorstorm, Heavenly Sword, Killzone, Uncharted, Infamous, God of War, The Last of Us and M.A.G.. Half of these game franchises have been abandoned, Killzone and Infamous were tech demos, and so the only high quality entries from this list of exclusives to release this generation are God of War and Uncharted, with TLoU2 still waiting for a release date. The only other exclusive that has me interested is Death Stranding, but beyond that, every other game I'm interested in is also on Xbox One.

And no, I'm not interested in Spider-Man. The whole Marvel Universe thing has been played out for a while now. Would I play it? sure, but I'm not interested in it necessarily. The same goes for Bloodborne. Beyond all of these titles, there's not much else there IMO. What I will say for Microsoft, is that they offer online multi-player experiences with their big three franchises, that Sony has never managed to achieve. They don't have a massively successful online FPS shooter, or onlineTPS, and they are severely behind on driving games where Microsoft has the most popular driving games this generation, particularly with Forza Horizon.

But then you get into the hardware side of things, where Xbox has much higher quality hardware, particularly the Xbox One controller, and a console that can actually do real 4K, not this fake checkerboard rendering in a supposed 4K console that doesn't even play 4k discs, and people were very vocal about their discs at the beginning of this generation.

Microsoft also has a more expansive set of network features by far, and has the more stable online infrastructure by far. Don't get me wrong, Sony is still making a good product, but they have sucked people in with their marketing this generation, in a way that I have rarely seen in my life. I would almost call it brainwashing, because the brand loyalty is so off the charts.

[TK-66]

Really? I thought the issue was that a lot of their games released too soon. MCC and State of Decay 2 being great examples of games that launched badly but are great games today.

[Hedstrom]

Lol, that was a good one XD

[thatguyhayat]

That made me chuckle cause you're not wrong

[Hyperstrada]

that is not what I took from reading the article

[Unspoken]

Hey look, another troll! Read the article then post your unrelated bs.

BTW Forza 4 says hi. Yes please keep adding modifiers to your comment and keep moving those goal posts.

[rainslacker]

MS future is apparently what Sony offers now for free I guess. No PSNow required to do what Sony allowed in a limited fashion on PS3, and allowed across the board on PS4.

MS is so patient, they let Sony come up with the idea, then found a way to put it behind the xCloud paywall. I suppose we can give MS credit for it though, they had remote desktop as far back as Windows 95.

Other than that, MS hasn't really laid out their pricing structure, just a bunch of marketing about how well it's going to work. I'm not sure how that equates to the best blueprint, unless the best blueprint means that they are the one's spending the most money marketing a service which they haven't released yet, and their closest competition already released years ago.

Seriously, to those writing these kinds of articles, these MS praise articles for their streaming future are getting really tiresome. I don't care about PSNow or xCloud, or Stadia, but give credit where it's due if you're going to write an article about this stuff. At least know what's out there when writing an article like this, because otherwise, it makes you sound ignorant.

[PhoenixUp]

“Wait till E3” has become a pathetically sad catchphrase for the “patient” Xbox loyal fanbase

[Thundercat77]

Is called the endless pathetically loop.

[Tross]

Yeah, if anyone is patient it's Xbox's fanbase. They have to put up with a lack of exclusives and anxiously await any dribble of content that comes their way. On top of that they have to put up with all this subscription BS. I don't think air quotes are necessary here as they're clearly some of the most patient people there are. The company behind their beloved Xbox brand on the other hand...

[rainslacker]

I must admit. I do find it odd all these Xbox fans were all over Sony in the first year because of their apparent lack of games. MS has fewer game releases in the last two years, than Sony had in their first two, and certainly much less of the high profile AAA games, yet MS is doing great, or will do great.

It does seem like a double standard to be so willing to give MS so much time, because apparently these things don't happen overnight, but when it comes to Sony, they still can't deliver enough 6 years into the gen, or for some reason, their high profile AAA games aren't good enough in comparison to SoT, CD3, or SoD2. But somehow, FH3 trumps every and all games Sony has ever released, and despite not selling anywhere near what the Sony games have been selling the past few years, is the prime reason it's worth owning a X1....coupled with you can get dirt cheap games from Game Pass.

It's like the Xbox fan boys live in a completely different world from the Sony fan boys, because their criteria seem vastly different on what makes a console good. It's almost at the point where I sometimes wonder why there is even a console war between the two anymore.

[ApocalypseShadow]

A one sided leaning article that uplifts Microsoft while downplaying Apple and Google offerings to make their case. Mentions Sony in reference to console competition while not even mentioning that Sony has been doing streaming services and allowing remote play away from the parent console for years and is the leader at it so far.

I see Apple cornering their own user base on Apple products. I don't see Microsoft cutting into that. Google will have their followers as they have with Android Gaming and cheap games to play. It's Microsoft that has to cut into those business as that is the consumers they are trying to reach. That 2 billion consumers are already using Apple or Google/Android products.

They'll get some consumers to buy in. But core gamers like myself will never buy a game you don't own on disc or can download to physical hardware. That's ridiculous to me to buy a game that's on a server for full price. Should be you pay a monthly fee to access all content like Netflix if that's what they are trying to be like.

Only thing Microsoft has is its own player base and the possibility of getting them to play beyond the console. Which negates a reason to own a console or even make one. The only reason they are making one is because core gamers would be pissed off at them for chasing casuals like Microsoft did with Kinect. But that's the consumers they are chasing at again. While Sony announced they are sticking with core gamers and will double down on them.

[WelkinCole]

People forget that apart from xboxlive. There is not much else of an ecosystem that MS fully controls like Apple and Google to some degree with android.

Nin has cut out their own market like Apple and Sony has most of the core console gaming market. That leaves MS with not much

[Unspoken]

Only Google and certainly not Apple have shown a robust cloud presence, with Sony even buying in to Azure services. There is no doubt Microsoft is in a very good position to leverage their own infrastructure and take off in this new market. And if gaming is the topic, and you have a choice of three brands, Apple, Google, and MS Xbox, we know who has the greatest mind share in gaming.

And again here is why Microsoft is going to lead, xCloud + Game Pass. It will be the best package tailored for all gamer types. Download or stream, to your Xbox Console or PC and likely more devices in the future. Unfortunately hardcore gamers will be slowing Sony down from making any advancement into the future.

[rainslacker]

I think MS can manage to get some of the PC gamer playing base. But they will have to go a little harder on promoting their store to do so. They've really kept their Windows store marketing pretty low key, and one may not even know it exists if they didn't keep up on things. It's kind of contrary to some of their other efforts to make a digital store....such as the failed Metro crap. Even GFWL was installed fairly prominently on new OEM hardware installs, although not consumer level installs outside of being in the Metro "start menu" crap.

But, as of now, MS really doesn't have the PC gamers ear. No matter how much Xbox gamers want to clamor on about how MS is winning their hearts, it's just not the case. PC gamers aren't locked into any one place, and I think the recent stuff with EGS shows that Steam has a pretty strong foothold on the PC market. MS can certainly make headway, but I don't know how well they're going to do other than their own games released on the system, and the more casual people who may just happen across the windows store at any given time.

MS isn't failing in the Windows Store as far as I know. But I wouldn't say it's a primary storefront for most of the gamers on PC, who I'd say most would say consider PC gamers, not windows gamers. The platform on PC is incidental to them, and they have never fought to boost MS up, nor are they acting like MS catering to them again as some sort of return of a mesiah. All the praise lays squarely on the Xbox fan boys. MS knows this, PC gamers know this, the observant gamer elsewhere can see this. It's just the way it is. So, MS will have to be patiant, because capturing hundreds of millions of PC gamers is going to take time, and attrition isn't necessary, and Steam isn't really screwing up big time.

[FGHFGHFGH]

MS failed with uwp, which would've forced devs to only be able to sell and update through windows store. PC gamers and apparently pc devs wanted no part of it. Since they also gave up on smartphones, uwp in useless. PC gamers know about windows store, they just don't use it. It didn't help that they blocked windows 7 users from using it (it probably wouldn't have mattered) and games like call of duty couldn't even be played with other pc gamers lol

[rainslacker]

UWP wasn't really part of their smart phone initiive. They failed on that long before they came out with UWP. They were using .NET for their Windows Phone OS. Windows Phone OS was actually quite nice, but they went and started requiring quad core processors so many people who adopted early were left with phones that only had half the functions, and no companies were bothering to write their programs in .NET, even though .NET could be used on Droid and iDevices. Was kind of funny that devs were more willing to write two seperate programs instead of adopt one that would work across three different ones, and was actually easier to use, and allowed for release on PC as well.

Anyhow, UWP is useless for games on PC. It was just an extra layer, and mostly just make the program locked to a single storefront. There was no reason to write games with it, as it offered no advantage to the dev whatsoever. Windows store doesn't require one use UWP though. I do agree they didn't do it any favors by blocking it from Windows 7, although that was more a DirectX thing, which they backpeddled on.

MS I think tries to hard to control things in the PC space. I get their reasoning, but you'd think after all these attempts, they'd come to realize that people don't like to jump through hoops. Developers aren't going to. Their competition isn't going to make it easy on them. So you'd think they'd just realize that being consumer friendly on PC with how products work is the best way to get people to use your products. They don't seem to have any problem realizing this with their enterprise solutions, where they do offer the choice, and it allows their clients to choose what's best for them, so maybe try that in their consumer level products and see how it goes. I think they're doing that more with their Xbox plans overall, how it turns out we'll see over time.

[XiNatsuDragnel]

So patient

[l33t_haxx0r]

Just face it, Xbox is crap. Mediocre at best, games are pathetic, next gen will be the same.

[JonTheGod]

Xbox's plan to stream from your own console is not revolutionary in the slightest. PS4 has done this for its entire lifespan with Remote Play on Vita. All Xbox has done is to stream to an app instead. Nothing new here at all.

Streaming from servers via XBL or PSN will be the same quality due to the Sony/MS partnership.

Neither party is revolutionary (at this point).

Let's wait to see what the full reveals for each system tells us. Sadly, this won't be until towards the end of the year (at the earliest).

[rainslacker]

PS3 could do this for some games if the publisher allowed it. It wasn't behind a paywall. I'm not even sure if Remote play is behind the PS+ paywall on PS4.

There's also no partnership between MS and Sony yet, so should wait to see where that goes before claiming it the case. But I also think they're both going to have their own internal solutions on the cloud side, so it's possible they wouldn't be the same in terms of content quality on delivery. MS isn't going to do anything anti-competitive to hinder Sony though, because MS proper cares more about keeping Sony as a client, than they do about making xCloud look better....plus, it's illegal, and would damage their reputation as a cloud provider which is their primary path to the future of their company.

[rlow1]

Yeah I second that oathbreaker. The article was a quick qip on how Xbox is positioned well because of the different strategies it has pursued......These people seem really jaded.....to bad......but hey, I guess in this positive world today you need something negative to be obsessed about.

[Tross]

Are you sure you're not confusing patience with...just moving at a glacial pace? For someone so "patient" Phil sure talks a lot. I sure as heck wouldn't compare MS to a cat lying in wait as the latter is way more clandestine.

There is no era of subscription-based cloud gaming coming unless the consumer wills it. It may become more prominent and co-exist alongside other more traditional methods of game distribution, but calling it an era-defining shift reeks of desperation by the suits of various companies. What I don't hear from MS is anything about the upcoming exclusives they expect from those new studio acquisitions. I for one look forward to pre-ordering a PS5, buying as many games physically as possible, and buying the rest digitally while not engaging in any game streaming unless Sony can make me feel really compelled to do so(unlikely, but if anyone can do it, it's them). If MS plans on repeating this gen but with even more talk about subscriptions, I plan on ignoring their next system entirely.

[rainslacker]

Kind of reminds me of one company I worked at back when I was in IT security. They had so many meetings, that it felt like all they did was talk, and nothing ever happened. It's probably why they ended up going under. Good ideas, and they could keep the moral high, but when it came to delivery, they were always behind. Most of the meetings were about how they could stop being behind, while talking about what they could do to keep clients happy, and make more money. Sometimes, plans were put into place, and action was taken, but it still took a long time, and nothing much productive came from it.

It's almost exactly how it feels from MS right now, along with Spencer being the mouthpiece, and the consumer being the people in the meeting he's trying to convince.

[Elda]

Too patient with no new AAA exclusives since 2016 except Forza.