Xbox announced an exciting future for players and game creators, including dozens of new games, a new 1TB Series S console and new ways for players to get their games anywhere with PC Game Pass coming to NVIDIA GeForce NOW later this year.
“Our ambition is to release at least four first-party games a year – although we’ll balance that out with careful consideration for each project’s needs. That’s on top of the work our teams are doing to grow our existing communities that we’ve fostered over many years like The Elder Scrolls Online, Sea of Thieves, Minecraft, Forza, and so on.” Xbox wrote.
Xbox also mentioned its Starfield Direct game, “which will have a simultaneous release on Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Steam – with Game Pass day one on Xbox, PC and Cloud – it’s our belief that Starfield will become the most-played Bethesda Game Studios title, ever. Bethesda Game Studios has built on the Xbox development platform for a long time, and now that Bethesda is part of the Xbox family, we’ve been able to support them more than ever – and its allowed the team to create the most ambitious game in the studio’s history, inside their first new universe for her 25 years.”
The biggest part of Xbox’s press release is this:
Today we shared that Game Pass members will soon be able to stream select PC games from the library through NVIDIA GeForce NOW. This will enable the PC Game Pass catalog to be played on any device that GeForce NOW streams to, like low spec PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, mobile devices, TVs, and more, and we’ll be rolling this out in the months ahead…
The Verge reported that Microsoft is planning to bring PC Game Pass titles to NVIDIA’s GeForce Now streaming service. “You’ll be able to play your PC Game Pass catalog on all the devices supported by NVIDIA’s GeForce Now,” said Sarah Bond, head of Xbox creator experience.
“This will enable the PC Game Pass catalog to be played on any device that GeForce Now streams to, like low spec PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, mobile devices, TVs, and more, and we’ll be rolling this out in the months ahead,” said Joe Skrebels, Xbox Wire editor in chief, in a blog post.
The Verge noted that GeForce Now members will be able to “stream select PC games from the library,” so it doesn’t look like it will be the full catalog. Either way, this is a big deal for cloud gaming, allowing PC Game Pass subscribers to use Nvidia’s superior game streaming service with RTX 4080 levels of performance.
The Verge also reported that in their own testing, they found the RTX 4080 tier of GeForce Now was far superior to Microsoft’s own Xbox Cloud Gaming offering for performance and latency.
Personally, I’m in favor of giving players access to more games through Xbox S|X. I play several games on my Xbox S. That said, it appears that the release of more Bethesda games through Xbox is limited to people who have NVIDIA GeForce Now.