Xbox recently announced the ability to play high end games on your tablet, phone or low spec pc. This is using cloud computing where all the heavy lifting is done on a remote computer and the results are streamed to your device. Some truly sophisticated games like forza 5 or Gears 5 can be played this way.
Wouldn’t it be great to do a quick flight on MSFS while on the bus or waiting in the Drs waiting room. Imagine using your iphone as a vr headset while controlling the plane on a linked xbox controller. Maybe it’s not authentic enough for simmers. Anyway I was wondering when cloud gaming is coming to MSFS and whether the simming community would embrace it…
I’ll give my personal opinion for what it’s worth. Cloud gaming is for sure the way of the future but by future, I mean a fair way off. ubiquitous high-speed connectivity is not a reality and without that, you will struggle.
Will MSFS be on the XBOX cloud platform? I would imagine so, I cant think of a better tech demo to use if MS want to flex their cloud muscles. lets face it if they can get it running even relatively useable on a pure cloud gaming platform it will be a major achievement.
Now the last and probably the most contentious part of your question. Will the simmer community embrace it? personally I don’t think so. The swimming community as we know is made up of everyone from casual flyers doing a bit of sight seeing all the way through to the uber geek level which will be able to tell you that there is a rivet missing on an exterior model of an aircraft because everyone knows that in 1987 they switch manufacturing techniques which means there should be 6 rivets on that panel, not 5.
Clearly a little bit of casual sight seeing might be fine for 20 mins on your phone or tablet, but even that will likely become tiresome really quickly, for everyone else who wants to do some “proper flying” its just not going to work.
Just my thoughts. For me, I’m not a rivet counter, but I sure as heck won’t be doing any flying without my yoke, throttle quadrant, rudder pedals, and a myriad of other planning tools open to me 
I guess time will tell.
One use case that might work would be using cloud gaming on an old underpowered PC, which might well help open the hobby out to others that don’t have a Series X/S or a relatively decent PC to play it on.
2 Likes
High speed, and low latency. I could see it working well with some games, and over some connections. Flight sims would probably be fine, but some twitch based shooters might not.
Microsoft has already announced that MSFS will be available in the cloud some time in the future. This will be the only way for Xbox One players to experience the sim, by the way, and this will be the case with many more “next-gen only” titles going forward (like Starfield next year, or the next Forza Motorsport). However, cloud gaming is not yet available on consoles. Microsoft plans to introduce this feature some time in November. After that (or maybe in time for that, who knows) MSFS will become available in Cloud Gaming as well.
It also poses some technical challenges, though. Since MSFS itself streams a lot of data from the cloud, streaming the whole game is probably more demanding than streaming a regular “offline” title, so it’s possible that the optimal experience will require more bandwidth.
Remember that the stream you see is just the image data that would be sent to a monitor. The data that it has to stream to make that image doesn’t need to come to your tablet or phone, just the remote machine you are connected to. The speed of your connection to that remote machine will have no bearing on the ability to access PG data, for example, that’s reliant on the connection from the remote machine to the raw data.
1 Like
I am in the Alpha Ring for Coud gaming - it really works good. Perhaps not good enough for an e-sports shooter gamer. but for an normal gamer it runs very good. MS will also invest more in the local datacenter , so that latency issue will be lesser.
2 Likes
Really good point about users with under powered PC’s or laptops. Most of my friends won’t spend $3000usd + on a gaming pc. Cloud gaming will expand the MSFS community considerably if it works well.
5 Likes
And you dont need any kind of xbox hardware… .in the next future there will be an native xcloud app runing directly on television…
1 Like
This I totally agree with. It’s coming. What we’re seeing now is the very start of that. This tech is still in its infancy. For the time being, the best experiences will be slower moving games where higher latency doesn’t cause the game to be unplayable or give the user a huge disadvantage. Atm, it’s mostly people that have a solid high speed Internet connection that will have great game streaming experiences. Those with low end, high latency connections, not so much. For now…
I’m not a betting man, but if I was, I’d be willing to wager a significant amount that if the next gen Xbox isn’t 100% cloud / streaming based, the next version after that will be 8-10 years down the road. Your console, whatever flavour you have, will be an inexpensive thin client and they’ll be making their money from their services vs hardware and game sales. Ditto for running a software client on a computer, phone, tablet, etc. As long as your client is able to real-time decode the video stream being fed to you, you’re good to go. No need for powerful hardware to run even the latest, greatest titles at full detail.
We’re just waiting for infrastructure (ubiquitous broadband) and its supporting hardware to catch up before it’s a viable technology for everyone.
2 Likes
Not sure. But I will say that I have had good luck streaming MSFS from AWS. Something like a flight simulator is much better suited for game streaming than a fast action game because much less is moving onscreen at once. Had graphics set to max and LOD turned up all the way, and couldn’t tell that it wasn’t running locally.
Cloud/Computing/Gaming reminds me of the way it was in a computer center way back.
Everyone had “terminals” and all the grunt work was done by our mainframe in the glass house.
…
Then we slowly replaced all those “Dumb” terminals with PC’s because the “User” wanted more “Flexibility” and “Control” and was tired of the glass house telling them , sorry, we cant do that now, maybe next month.
…
Then we hooked all the PC’s up to our “Network” and once again gained control of their PC… Watching them, installing software for them, snooping and capturing screen shots and inappropriate activity…
…
We “managed” their PC’s and once again, the Glass House was back in control.
…
hehe … Amazing how history repeats over and over…
3 Likes
“Joe, what where you doing on the John for 4 hours?”
“Sorry, there was a group flight and the vatsim controller had a heck of a time sequencing me in to KBOS.”