Xbox Announces Two New Methods To Play Games Through The Cloud

Team Xbox continues to make improvements to playing games through the cloud, and they’ve just announced two new methods for doing just that – both launching in “preview” form later today.

The first of these is the ability to use your phone as a controller, which will be available across Android and iOS on supported Smart TVs (including certain Amazon, LG, Samsung and other models) in this preview.

To access this, you’ll just need to turn on the “Preview Features” in the Xbox app on your supported TV:

To try it, turn on Preview Features under Settings > Account in the latest supported Smart TV experience. When you launch a game without a physical controller connected, you’ll see an option to use your phone for that session.

The second new method is something called “cloud connect”, which allows you to connect using Wi-Fi to reduce input latency in Xbox Cloud Gaming titles. The catch here is that it only works with the new Xbox Nano Controller for now, and even then it “won’t work with every cloud gaming experience yet” during the preview phase.

Here’s a bit more about it, along with an image:

Players in the U.S. can preview cloud connect with the XBOX Nano Controller starting today. Instead of a Bluetooth connection to your TV, cloud connect uses your Wi-Fi to connect directly to the cloud server running your game. That can help reduce input latency, so gameplay may feel more responsive. Cloud connect is still an early test, so it won’t work with every cloud gaming experience yet. For now, you can try it on supported Smart TVs and the web.

For what it’s worth, it’s been rumoured by Windows Central that the “cloud connect” feature will become part of all Xbox controllers in the future, but for the time being it remains exclusive to the Nano.

So, there you go! It seems these will remain in a preview state for a decent amount of time as the team aims to “shape the experience”, so be sure to provide feedback if you have any improvements in mind.

We’ll leave you with a related story about the new Nano controller that released today down below.