In a short Twitter conversation on February 16th, 2024, Xbox boss Phil Spencer mentioned a potential timeline for a much-awaited feature: playing your own purchased games on xCloud, Microsoft’s cloud gaming service. When responding to user NASburg’s question, Spencer said, “You should be able to do this year.” However, this brief reply raises some important questions.
While Spencer’s comment suggests that Microsoft is working to make owned games playable on xCloud in 2024, there are no specific details or official confirmation. It is currently unclear whether this functionality will be available earlier or later in the year. Also, it’s unknown if there will be any limitations or conditions, like restrictions on specific games, compatibility issues, or the need for additional subscriptions beyond existing Xbox services.
The thing is that you can’t just put a disc into your Xbox and claim it’s yours. You could always just borrow a game from a friend or rent one from a service like GameFly. So there’s no good way to keep track of that from the Xbox. So, it may just be a digital-game-only thing.
The potential update would bring big changes to xCloud. Right now, it’s all about playing games from Xbox Game Pass and some free ones. If this happens, you’d get to play your own games, making xCloud more interesting. It could give you more options and maybe mean you don’t have to keep buying new consoles or upgrading them as often.
While it seems strange that a random interaction would confirm this, some comments have mentioned that this year was a target yet, but it had not been confirmed. We’re taking this as confirmation. Microsoft has not made any formal statements regarding this specific timeline, but Spencer is the boss, so no one would know more.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to see what xCloud really is and how it will integrate with Game Pass.
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