Xbox Without the Box

Who's winning the console wars?

Late 2020; an eternity ago. We were only just beginning to suspect the long-term ramifications of the impending shipping and supply crisis that would ensnare the globe. One of the first scary indicators I was aware of was the lack of gaming consoles available for Christmas.

The two biggest names in the game had only just released their latest generation devices and yet it was proving almost impossible to find one on a shelf. Prices on the black market were through the roof and  stories began to emerge of excited customers taking delivery of their eagerly awaited gaming machines only to discover something else in the box (even cereal in one case) while their actual console had "gone missing" somewhere in transit.

Due to this unprecedented demand and worryingly short supply, for many gamers, Christmas 2020 never came.

As a result, it was easy for manufacturers to claim the greatest sales success of all time; empty shelves must mean these new consoles were the hottest ticket item ever... right?

Ah marketing. Gotta love it.

One thing can't be denied; both new consoles (or all three if you count both S and X-Series Xboxes) were genuinely good. These really were the machines we'd all been waiting for - even if the wait was proving longer than we'd expected.

At around the same time though, Xbox started getting something else seriously right too. And now that thing is working so well, I wouldn't be surprised if we never see another actual Xbox ever again.

That thing is Game Pass; hundreds of Xbox games available for download for an extremely reasonable monthly fee.

Game Pass is one of those obvious ideas that seems like it should be easy to do but clearly isn't, otherwise everybody else would be doing it too. Certainly as someone who often weighs up gaming performance as a crucial factor when reviewing laptops and PC's, the ability to download the game I'm currently playing onto any computer and pick up exactly where I left off has proved invaluable.

In saying that, there are limitations. Not every computer has the technical capacity to run a high-performance game. Another frequent frustration of mine is how long it takes to download a big game like Marvel's Avengers - especially if you're on Wi-Fi and not hardwired in via LAN. I've had the fun experience of both those issues combined; waiting hours for a game to download only to discover the laptop I was using didn't have the graphics grunt to run it. Joy.

Oh... and if you're using a Mac, forget it. Obviously. I mean, why would a Mac user want to play cool games?

Now it would appear Xbox has pretty much solved all that.

Xbox Cloud Gaming is another simple concept that before now, has proved virtually impossible to implement; the idea is to stream your games, rather than store them locally - think Netflix or Spotify but for gaming.

Up till this point, the major obstacle has probably been an infrastructure issue - streaming audio doesn't use as much internet as video. Video not as much as gaming. In order to achieve the kind of two-way interaction required to do things like kick spiky blob monsters out of the way in Guardians of the Galaxy, you need a big, fat pipe of ultra-fast broadband indeed. Thanks to fibre and 5G, that pipe is now a reality and so is Xbox Cloud Gaming.

What's more, it actually works.

And not just on PC's either, As long as you're signed up to an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, you can now access a huge library of high quality games from PC, laptop and even Android phones. Oh and yes, Macs too. Crazy, right? Playing PC games on a Mac? Did you ever think you'd live to see the day?

In fact, you can even do it on iPads and iPhones although bear in mind, for games that require a controller, you'll need one that's compatible with whichever device you're wanting to game on. I have a very versatile 8BitDo bluetooth controller that works with consoles, smart phones and my 24-inch iMac - but not iPhones or iPads weirdly. Oh well.

While there's no comparison in terms of graphics capability between streaming via Xbox Cloud Gaming and playing a locally installed version of the game on a high-spec gaming rig, I've been gobsmacked by how well this setup works on most devices - some even offer the option of "Clarity Boost" - which makes already pretty decent image quality even sharper.

Lag time with controls varies quite a bit depending on which device you're using and how you're connected - obviously a PC on fibre is going to out-perform a phone on sketchy Wi-Fi but generally speaking, from this amateur gamer's point of view, the performance is kind of unbelievable.

And now, thanks to a colab with Samsung, there's one more part of the equation that adds up to the eventual retirement of consoles altogether. 

2022-model Samsung TV's now offer their own Xbox app. This means anyone with a Game Pass Ultimate subscription can play Xbox on their bright, shiny, new Samsung telly without a console. All you need to do is pair a compatible bluetooth controller and you've essentially converted your big ole TV into your own, powerful, self contained gaming device.

It looks amazing and again, to my very untrained noob-gamer eye, there's virtually no lag between the controller and the server-hosted game you're playing.

This all leaves the question; will Xbox ever make another console? While there may be a transition period as the TV-streaming solution comes of age, it looks like that won't take too long. Before we know it, Xbox will be just another app on the screen - albeit a very powerful app and undoubtedly one of our favourites.

    

    

Click here for more information about Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Click here for more information about the Xbox app on Samsung TVs.