Streaming game services will hit their stride in 2021 and could revolutionize mobile gaming…but Apple still stands in the way.
Every year seems to be the year of Mobile Gaming, when some hot new game or phone tech will usher in a new era legitimizing playing games on smartphones. And yet, the biggest innovation of the year that could forever change Mobile Gaming is…an innovation for regular gaming: game streaming services. The promise of streaming is simple: instead of playing locally, your game runs on a machine some distance away with footage streamed to you in real-time (with control inputs relayed back and forth). The device you stream it to doesn’t need to be powerful – heck, it doesn’t need much more than a display – and hence, it’s perfect for mobile streaming. At E3 2019, we got hands-on time with Microsoft xCloud, streaming Xbox games directly to a smartphone. It was impressive – we were able to play Halo 5, Sea of Thieves, and Gears 5 with an Xbox One controller clipped to a phone running the game – but didn’t have a release date or details about how players would access it. In late 2020, we learned it would simply be folded into Xbox Game Pass as part of the Ultimate subscription tier… and just like that, xCloud was just a small upgrade away from the 15 million Game Pass subscribers. Microsoft pledged over 150 Xbox One games would be playable on xCloud at launch (it came out in the US in beta on September 15 and is slowly rolling out to more countries), with more coming when EA Play is fully integrated in 2021, and Xbox Series X titles will be added, too – all playable on smartphones. Google Stadia has let subscribers stream games on mobile for awhile now – on Android since it launched on WiFi then on the go since July 2020, and recently on iOS through a slight workaround (more on that later). Amazon Luna was announced and quietly launched this year in a closed beta, while Nvidia GeForce Now had a surprise launch late in the year.
