Introduction
For a while now, games have been getting larger and larger in terms of their file sizes, with Call Of Duty being widely criticised for updates that have at times topped over 100GB. However, also on the rise has been the trend of being able to stream a game, with no additional hardware needed other than a device capable of the right speeds and processing, as well as a controller, or even just a touch screen in some cases.
With Microsoft’s XCloud recently opening up to all Game Pass Ultimate subscribers in 2021 and with PlayStation 5’s only just starting to become more widely available, I thought I’d take a look at the options those who either don’t want to upgrade or can’t afford to do so have with their existing setups.
PlayStation Now (PS Now)
PS Now, much like XCloud, allows you to play various games across the generations of Sony hardware, going all the way back to the PlayStation 2 era. However, as great as this might sound, there are a few caveats that you may want to be aware of before diving in to historic games like Mortal Kombat 2011 or the God Of War franchise.
Separate Subscription
Complicated Free Trial
At time of testing, 7 day free trial did not seem to apply, instead the app forced me to purchase a one month subscription for £8.99.
Difficult To Use App
On PC, instead of seeing game names, all I say was “my list”, over and over again, even though I was moving around in various game categories for instance.
Performance
Mortal Kombat 2011 (MK from here on out) was my benchmark for testing, given I’d not long ago played it on original PS3 hardware. The snappy speeds of the PlayStation 5 console I was streaming to were easy to see, of course after I’d seen a few seconds of “preparing Your Game”/”Game Starting Soon” prompts, much like Microsoft’s offering. Being able to utilise Optical Character Recognition (OCR) wasn’t even necessary to read these prompts, as they are fully narrated by the screen reader. However, it will be required after the game is loaded as, much as you’d expect, these titles do not have support for newer hardware in mind unfortunately.
During battle, MK felt just as if I were playing it locally, with combos working just as they did on the actual hardware. Injustice 2, as a further example, felt just as good streaming as it did downloaded.
XCloud
XCloud
XCloud is Microsoft’s entry into the streaming space and, though you do have to pay a relative premium for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (XGPU for short), the results are nonetheless impressive.
No Complicated Trial
Given I was already a subscriber to XGPU, more specifically having upgraded from standard Game Pass to test this feature when it first launched, there was no complications with having to sign up for a separate service that would be available alongside my multiplayer subscription as was the case with Sony’s offering. I simply went to Xbox.com/play, with an in-depth FAQ answering all the question I had about control methods, required speeds and the like
Fortunately this page is fairly easy to navigate with a screen reader (specifically NVDA in my case) running in Google Chrome, being able to find a game by moving through links on the page and pressing enter to select it.
A Caveat
I said the above FAQ answered my questions, but I can’t recall seeing any refeerence to an interesting lack of a feature that most might think to be standard: the lack of vibration/haptics when using a controller. Even when the controller is directly wired into the PC, for no.