People will be able to play Xbox Game Pass games through a cloud connection to the 2022 Samsung smart TVs.
Microsoft
Microsoft is launching an Xbox app for smart TVs, which allows consumers to play Xbox video games even if they don’t have consoles.
Microsoft said on Thursday that it will first bring the app to Samsung’s 2022 smart TVs and then expand distribution to other manufacturers. It’s a bold bet for Microsoft, after Xbox hardware revenue rose 92 percent last year. The company said the app will be available from June 30 in 27 countries.
The move indicates that Microsoft is focusing on revenue from content and gaming services, rather than just consoles, where the company is lagging behind Nintendo and Sony. Microsoft’s biggest impact on gaming came earlier this year, when the company announced plans to buy game publisher Activision Blizzard for $ 68.7 billion.
The game is Microsoft’s fourth-largest product category, and the company aims to attract more users to its Game Pass subscription service, which costs $ 10 a month and includes an option for people who play computers and stream to through the cloud.
The hardware business gained momentum in 2020 after Microsoft launched its Xbox Series X and S consoles, and as people spent more time playing while offices and schools were closed due to the Covid pandemic. But component shortages and, more recently, blockages in China have hampered Microsoft’s ability to produce new consoles.
“We’ve taken global quotas for two consecutive quarters and are the market leader this quarter among next-generation consoles in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Western Europe,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts in a conference call. April.
But the overall picture is not as rosy. London-based researcher Ampere Analysis estimates that Microsoft sold 7.7 million Xbox Series S and X consoles in 2021, while Sony sold 12.5 million PlayStation 5 systems and Nintendo sold 24.3 million. of Switches.
Players will be able to play on the Xbox application with Sony DualSense drivers connected via Bluetooth, as well as with Microsoft Xbox wireless drivers.
By opening games off the console, Microsoft goes where players play. This means serving mobile devices with Apple or Google operating systems. More than 25 million Game Pass subscribers can play games from Microsoft data centers on these devices.
A year ago, Microsoft said the Xbox division was developing streaming devices for cloud gaming. The company will not require players to connect special devices to Samsung TVs to play games through the Xbox app.
“We’ve made the decision to move away from the current iteration” of a transmission device named Keystone, a Microsoft spokesman told CNBC in an email. “We will take advantage of our learning and focus our efforts on a new approach that will allow us to offer Xbox Cloud Gaming to more players around the world in the future.”
Samsung leads the smart TV market with a 21.3% share, according to data from Informa Tech technology research subsidiary Omdia.
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