Sarah Bond: Xbox Game Pass Ultimate’s Least Popular Feature Is Cloud Gaming

One of the concerns raised about Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard is in regard to the future of cloud gaming.

During a cross-examination at the Microsoft and FTC trial earlier on, Xbox’s corporate vice president of gaming Sarah Bond played down suggestions about Xbox’s growth of cloud gaming in the future, and the idea of it being a separate market – suggesting it’s mostly used as “just a console feature”.

Xbox Cloud Gaming apparently isn’t popular when compared to other Game Pass Ultimate features, and is also running at a loss. Here’s what she had to say, courtesy of IGN:

“What we’ve found is that it’s really being used by our players as a feature for the console…Because what people can do is when you go in to start playing a game, instead of waiting to download it, you can start playing it right away while it’s downloading in the background, and that’s actually the majority of the usage of xCloud gaming today, is it’s just a console feature.”

Bond went as far as admitting it’s not always the most ideal way to game, either – explaining how the games being streamed to devices were built for next-generation consoles, so “it’s not always the best player experience”.

Although Call of Duty was a major talking point in the early phases of Microsoft’s acquisition, both the FTC and UK’s CMA have called out cloud gaming – raising concerns about the tech giant’s potential future dominance in this fast-growing market.