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Xbox building native games for the cloud, Portal designer to take the lead

Xbox building native games for the cloud, Portal designer to take the lead
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Xbox is reportedly building new games that are going to be fully native to the cloud, according to an interview on Polygon with Xbox Game Studios publishing head Peter Wyse.

Xbox’s aim to develop games that are “cloud-native” means making them more accessible to people who don’t have a gaming console or PC capable of playing video games.

Instead, the games would run purely from the cloud and be streamed directly to their mobile phone, television or any other compatible device.

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“We don’t know exactly what that looks like today, or what that even plays like,” says Wyse. Xbox is already ahead in delivering cloud gaming experiences to its users through the xCloud feature on Xbox Game Pass. This is the method of regular Xbox games being streamed to allow you to play big graphics-heavy games like Gears of War or Sea of Thieves on your mobile device.

But developing games that have the cloud in mind is another story. Xbox has already toyed with this with its latest iteration of Flight Simulator. While the game still requires an installation on PC (and next month with the launch on Xbox Series X|S), a lot of the data in that came such as geographic information and real-time weather patterns is streamed directly to you.

Ex-Valve developer Kim Swift, who worked on games such as Left 4 Dead and Portal, is leading the Xbox Cloud Gaming team as senior director. Swift was more recently working at Google Stadia designing games for the cloud there before Google shuttered the studio.

“Kim is going to build a team focused on new experiences in the cloud, something that’s going to support our mission of bringing our Xbox games to connect 3 billion gamers to play our games,” said Wyse in the Polygon interview.

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Olly Smith
Olly Smith
With a keen eye for hidden gems and long-forgotten retro titles, Olly is a games journalist who works hard to progress twenty minutes without a checkpoint only to fail on the home stretch.