At Microsoft’s Xbox E3 press conference, Xbox boss Phil Spencer gave a final launch date on the company’s cloud-based game streaming project xCloud and announced that the service will also offer console-powered game streaming when it launches this October.
Spencer says that the new feature allows xCloud users to turn their own Xbox One systems into a personal and free xCloud sever, in addition to having the option of playing xCloud-powered games remotely from one of Microsoft’s datacenters.
Announced last October, Microsoft stated at the time that the technology would need to go on a “multi-year journey” before being ready for the public.
Apparently, that timeline has been moved up, as the company is showing off the technology on the E3 show floor this year. The company previously announced it had opened up 13 data centers across North America, Asia, and Europe to support the upcoming service last month, and says that the platform allows devs that bring their games to the service to “dramatically scale their existing games across devices, with no additional development, no additional code base maintenance, and no separate updates.”
Xbox had previously allowed users to stream their consoles to their PCs via the Windows 10 Xbox app, now called the Xbox Console Companion. xCloud promises to be an expansion of that previous technology.
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