For years Microsoft was a big competitor with Sony as they competed against each other with not only first-party video game support but a line of console games as well. However, Microsoft started to change things up by offering their first-party exclusives to also be featured on the PC platform. Then to make things even more interesting, Microsoft made a move to provide consumers the ability to pay for a subscription fee that would grant them not only access to all of their first-party video games at launch but also select third-party video game titles too called Xbox Game Pass.
That wasn’t stopping Microsoft either as the company introduced their xCloud streaming service feature. This feature was mainly being tested out with the android line of smartphones as it essentially connected users to their Xbox Game Pass subscription service but, without the ability to download these big video game titles on a smartphone, the service would just stream the gameplay right to your smartphone. It made playing the latest games easy if you had a solid internet connection to stream the gameplay.
Since the launch, this streaming service was only providing players with 720p resolution which for smartphones, it’s not terrible. The smaller screens tend to handle playing videos and gameplay at this resolution without making it much of a blurry mess. While it’s tolerable playing these games on the smartphone platform, it’s not likely going to fly that well on anything bigger than a smartphone display. As a result, it looks like Microsoft is already making changes to their resolution streaming output.
New reports have come out that suggest Microsoft is starting to roll out tests for 1080p streaming for the Xbox Game Pass xCloud feature in preparation for the streaming functionality on the PC platform. We don’t have a firm announcement date as to when the Xbox Game Pass xCloud streaming feature will start rolling out to the likes of our PC but we’re hoping to hear news about it sooner than later. With all that said, because Microsoft has acquired more first-party studios like Bethesda and has made the Xbox Game Pass subscription service enticing, it would be interesting to see if Sony can bring out a competitor service for their video game lineup.
Source: Engadget