Xbox Expanding Cloud Streaming To Games You Already Own

First announced years ago, the ability to begin streaming games you own on Xbox but that aren’t part of Game Pass will go into testing for insiders beginning in November. It’ll add another meaningful perk to the Netflix-like subscription program, letting players stream games like Baldur’s Gate III and Elden Ring that they own but aren’t part of the existing Game Pass library.

That’s according to a new report by The Verge which says the expanded Xbox Cloud Gaming feature will go into live tests for members of the Xbox Insider program next month. It’s not clear which games will be part of the first wave, but presumably at some point in the future, a good portion of players’ digital game libraries will be accessible over their cloud mobile devices, laptops, and PC gaming handhelds, at least if they’re an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscriber.

This functionality was first teased back in 2020 as part of the Project xCloud beta but wasn’t part of the final launch version. Microsoft again teased that cloud streaming would be expanded to games outside of Game Pass near the end of 2022. “We’re excited to share that later this year, it’s our intent to roll out the ability for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members to play, from the cloud, select games they already own or have purchased outside the Xbox Game Pass library,” Xbox editorial head Will Tuttle wrote at the time. That never materialized either, though.

Two years later, it sounds like whatever technical snags or other problems were previously interfering have finally been smoothed over and Microsoft is ready to begin expanding Xbox Cloud Gaming in earnest. That initiative would be coming alongside a recently announced move to begin selling Xbox games directly inside of the Xbox app on Android devices following a court mandate against Google, as well as a recent increase to the price of a Game Pass Ultimate subscription from $18 a month to $20.

This new version of Xbox Cloud Gaming would bring it much closer to Nvidia’s GeForce Now which lets users stream PC games they already own to other devices, including less powerful PC hardware that wouldn’t be able to run those games natively. The biggest difference is that Nvidia currently offers that perk as part of a free subscription tier, albeit with notable caveats like lower resolution and timed sessions.