Microsoft’s xCloud reaches new milestone

Monitoring Desk

WASHINGTON: With little doubt, one of Microsoft’s major bets for its future of gaming is its xCloud service. Announced last year at E3, the project has taken a significant step forward that will be one of its first major tests before public trials can begin.

Phil Spencer announced on Twitter that xCloud has reached the ‘TakeHome’ milestone. As the name states, the platform has reached a point where employees can begin testing the service in the real world and are no longer confined to scenarios where networks and latency are tightly controlled.

With the company publicly stating that trials of the new service will begin later this year, this is a crucial step to finalizing the platform for the beta test and is likely one of the last major bridges that needs to be crossed before that can happen. In short, it looks like Microsoft is still on track to keeping its promises related to the availability of xCloud.

One thing I have heard was that for E3, Microsoft wanted to have a demo of the service outside of E3. Specifically, they wanted to demonstrate xCloud running from someone’s house and not on-stage, where the demo would look scripted like the previous demos. I don’t know if this segment is still being planned for E3 but the Take Home milestone would play into that narrative.

With E3 a little over a month away, Microsoft is preparing to talk about its next-generation consoles and strategy at a deeper level. I expect that we will hear about some of the specs of the next generation consoles and will also learn more about the strategy the company will use to launch its next-generation devices at their keynote on June 9th.

Courtesy: (thurrott.com)