As announced at their E3 presentation a couple of months ago, MS/XBox have made a lot of progress towards making their cloud streaming gaming service a reality. Dubbed Project xCloud, it’s presently in trials through one of their US server installations, with extended trials scheduled to start in early 2019.
The future of gaming is a world where you are empowered to play the games you want, with the people you want, whenever you want, wherever you are, and on any device of your choosing. Our vision for the evolution of gaming is similar to music and movies — entertainment should be available on demand and accessible from any screen. Today, I’m excited to share with you one of our key projects that will take us on an accelerated journey to that future world: Project xCloud.
Best bit in the announcement… the fact that 2 of the 54 Azure data centres that will facilitate Project xCloud are right here in sunny South Africa.
With datacenters in 54 Azure regions and services available in 140 countries, Azure has the scale to deliver a great gaming experience for players worldwide, regardless of their location.
Just to point out that Azure regions South Africa West and South Africa North have been announced and are not live. No Azure services are currently running in SA.
A limited subset of Azure services will be available in Q2 2019
Project xCloud have also just been announced. That they include those two regions hopefully means that when it comes out those regions will be included.
Seems like it’s a nice optional service which will feature alongside Microsoft’s gaming lineups it looks pretty cool. However, I don’t see it coming to SA very soon. Azure is set to come to SA this year but from what I remember it will be mostly focused on business and computing.
In principal stuff like this makes me very excited! But I am yet to be impressed with any game streaming service. There is a reason these things keep popping up and then disappearing almost just as fast.
Agreed, but that’s also why this project is of more interest to me - the amount of infrastructure and attention MS and XBox are investing in this (based on that video alone) gives me the idea that they are pretty determined to see Project xCloud work.
Microsoft’s xCloud game streaming will launch on September 15th on Android in 22 countries.
Of course, South Africa is not one of the 22 initial. countries (it’s pretty much limited to Canada and the US, 19 European countries, and South Korea.) Hopefully this first public phase will go well and the service will expand soon enough.
