Last month, Microsoft announced an interesting roll-out of the ‘Stream Your Own Game’ initiative, an update to Cloud Gaming that allowed users to play Xbox games they digitally owned over the internet on supported TVs and smart devices like phones, tablets and PCs. No download required.
Previously, you could only stream Game Pass Ultimate titles, ones specific to the service, but this new feature added select purchased games which couldn’t be accessed via your paid subscription, necessarily. The list started with 50 solid titles and included AAA stuff like Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat 1 and Star Wars Outlaws, as well as a bevy of indie offerings like Animal Well, The Plucky Squire, and the lauded Balatro.
Beginning today, Xbox Insiders in the Alpha Skip-Ahead and Alpha rings (secret Microsoft clubs you can only join by way of a glowing green blood pact, I’m assuming) can now try out the ‘Stream Your Own Game’ feature on Xbox consoles proper, and with more games added to the previously available 50, like Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake.
So basically, if you’re part of the special preview, you can now stream the (listed) owned games to your Xbox Series X|S or Xbox One. Although, if you’re still gaming on a crusty old Xbox One, what in God’s name are you doing, man. Not that it matters in this particular case, as the beauty of streaming transcends mortal hardware. That’s the whole point.
But why should I care, you ask? Well, Xbox is obviously aiming to open up streaming beyond the chosen games exclusive to its Game Pass Ultimate subscription and usher in a convenient future in which every game we buy will be playable via the ominous cloud.
I’d argue this is eventually where we’re headed as an industry anyway—if not in the next generation of gaming, but in the following, probably. All streaming, all the time, baby. Microsoft is ahead of the curve in this regard, I’d say, despite its recent hardware floundering and seeming lack of clear direction. ‘This is an Xbox’ got people flustered, but maybe that is the clear direction, after all. The direction is: You can access your game library on any device, anywhere. Consoles as we know them will soon be obsolete.
I actually reposted something that ex-PlayStation developer David Jaffe said earlier today on X, in which he was responding to someone lamenting Sony’s imminent acquisition of FromSoftware:
Jaffe has long been a proponent of game streaming technology, and if you watch any of his livestreams, you’ll see that much of his gameplay is pulled directly from NVIDIA’s GeForce Now service. I tend to agree with his futurist take, in that getting rid of traditional hardware altogether seems like a promising road to not only more games but better games, and with access for far more people in varied situations.
With any luck, we can finally ditch all the console war nonsense, as in the end, what you’re playing the games on doesn’t actually matter very much. It’s like squabbling about what kind of paper we should print books on. The words are what count. Streaming makes hardware, as we know it, irrelevant. This is good, I think.
There’s internet speeds to contend with, of course, but those are catching up every day. And realistically, you don’t need the fastest internet to enjoy game streaming. 10Mbps download is the bare minimum for Cloud Gaming on Xbox, with 5Ghz Wi-Fi recommended for wireless connectivity. Wired ethernet and higher download speed is always better, but damn, in the grand scheme of things, 10Mbps is nothing.
So if you’re an Xbox Insider and have participated in the green blood pact (I’m not and haven’t, sadly), give this new feature a spin and let me know how it’s working. It’ll be nice when ‘Stream Your Own Game’ rolls out to the masses at some point, because it’s a harbinger of things to come, better things, I’d wager. I recently purchased a PS5 Pro, and man, what a superfluous piece of hardware. Do away with it all, I say.
Let’s wizard our games over the internet. Actual magic.
