Xbox Cloud Gaming
Xbox cloud game-streaming service by Microsoft
Xbox Cloud Gaming, stylized as XBOX Cloud Gaming, is a cloud gaming service as part of Xbox offered by the latter's division of Microsoft. Initially released in beta testing in November 2019, the service later launched for subscribers of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on September 15, 2020. Xbox Game Pass cloud gaming is provided to subscribers at no additional cost. Xbox Cloud Gaming operates by linking the device to a remote server in the cloud.
Development
The ideas for the cloud service came within Microsoft around 2016, around the same time that Kareem Choudhry developed the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility for the Xbox One. As his team developed this solution, Choudhry also had the idea if they could provide these games without having need of a console, and got Spencer's go-ahead to start a small team to determine the feasibility of cloud gaming. The technology was deemed successful enough at around the time of Xbox Game Pass's introduction that Microsoft assembled a larger team to build up the cloud gaming platform.
Microsoft teased the service at E3 2018 and formally announced Project xCloud several months later, in October 2018. They demonstrated the service in March 2019 with the racing game Forza Horizon 4 playing on an Android smartphone with an Xbox One controller. Xbox head Phil Spencer used a private server during this time to test games on a remote connection.
The public source identifies “Xbox Cloud Gaming” as xbox cloud game-streaming service by Microsoft. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Xbox, Cloud and Gaming.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q64487188. None of the 4 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019, 2020, 2016 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Xbox Cloud Gaming” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.