Xbox launches cloud gaming for paying Game Pass subscribers in India

Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox is launching cloud gaming for customers in India, the agency introduced on Tuesday (November 11, 2025). Cloud gaming permits players to render graphics-intensive video games remotely, such that it’s streamed on their native system in actual time, from telephones and tablets to laptops, PCs and a few TVs. Xbox, which is among the principal gamers within the console gaming area, has provided cloud gaming in most of its main markets; India is the twenty ninth market to get the characteristic. 

Xbox’s cloud gaming is on the market to subscribers of Game Pass, a Netflix-like catalogue service providing a number of video games to subscribers; costs vary from ₹499–1,389 a month plus taxes. The principal competitor to Game Pass is Sony’s PlayStation Plus, which is priced at as much as ₹849 a month, and doesn’t supply cloud gaming in India in the mean time. 

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd additionally provides JioGamesCloud, which it included lately in a distribution take care of Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) maker Krafton. OnePlay is one other agency that provides cloud gaming. Xbox is, nonetheless, the biggest agency to take a crack on the medium, with a listing of latest and so-called AAA video games by its gaming studio subsidiaries in opposition to which different companies might battle to compete.

Cloud gaming has been each promising and difficult in India. The promise has come from the truth that it’s cheaper to get a cloud gaming subscription than it’s to buy or assemble a gaming PC or console that’s able to enjoying essentially the most demanding of video games (from a {hardware} viewpoint) than it’s to easily stream it from a shared server. The problem comes from the dominance of cell gaming, which counts a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of players, leaving little room for console and PC gaming.

Microsoft might properly pay attention to that problem — the agency’s Xbox consoles haven’t been obtainable from its authorised retailers for a number of weeks in India. “We have to cater to the market,” Arjun Varma, who heads Xbox’s strategic enlargement in India, mentioned. “What gamers in India want, what gives them value… We want to offer them choice and flexibility. They want to play across a range of devices, it’s a mobile first market.” The Xbox {hardware}’s availability could be topic to “market forces,” Mr. Varma mentioned.

Cloud gaming requires information packets to make spherical journeys extraordinarily rapidly, one thing that’s measured by a metric referred to as latency. 30 millisecond latency is usually accepted as an higher restrict for a easy cloud gaming expertise. Mobile networks, even excessive pace 5G ones, are typically not capable of obtain such a low latency in all instances as a result of method Bharti Airtel Ltd., Vodafone Idea Ltd. and Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd’s networks are constructed. 

But house fiber broadband, and WiFi linked to house networks, are higher able to dealing with cloud gaming. Testing of demo gear at Xbox’s launch on Wednesday at a Microsoft workplace in Noida confirmed a 140ms latency, whereas a Game Pass subscriber in Mumbai instructed The Hindu that they had been getting, at worst, 22 milliseconds. 

Mr. Varma mentioned that Xbox had not but partnered with a telecom or web service supplier, which can work out a number of the latency kinks in some components of the nation. “We are essentially looking at a phased approach in terms of our launch in India,” Mr. Varma mentioned. “Our teams would love to work and understand how we can collaborate with partners in India.” Documents from a court docket case leaked in 2020 revealed that Xbox was in talks with Jio for cloud gaming, although it seems this partnership didn’t materialise.