More than 10 million people have streamed games over Xbox Cloud Gaming, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. Cloud gaming is a feature only available as part of the $ 14.99 per month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate level, so the number shared on Tuesday indicates that many people are checking it out. It’s also a concrete statistic in a field where there have been few – Google does not distribute figures for Stadia, and all figures shared by Nvidia for GeForce Now include individuals who have used a free trial period without bindings.
Game Pass has proven popular since Microsoft said in January that the service grew to have 25 million subscribers, an increase from 18 million the year before. That said, it’s unclear how Microsoft defines what counts as a streamed game from Xbox Cloud Gaming, so we do not know exactly what the statistics may represent, how many current subscribers are included in the streamed game, or where a lot of playing time is. required for the company to count it as a stream. It’s also worth noting that you can technically sign up for a month’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for just a dollar and then cancel, and it’s unclear how many people did that and streamed a game that could also be counted. in Microsoft figures shared Tuesday.
Microsoft has invested heavily in Xbox Cloud Gaming, first launched on Android, then iOS and PC and then for Xbox consoles, all of which mean you can now stream a large library of Xbox games across a wide range of devices . (I even used it to play Psychonauts 2 on my Steam Deck, and it worked like a charm.) And as of October, the service is fully powered by custom Xbox Series X hardware, which improved framerates and load times, making it so much better to use.
But the company has also experienced strong hardware sales, with the Xbox having just had its best sales performance in March in 11 years, and the next generation of the Xbox has become much more readily available. Microsoft said Tuesday that Xbox hardware revenue has risen 14 percent. However, Microsoft’s CFO Amy Hood warned that Chinese shutdowns could affect future hardware sales, including “limited console supply.”