After Thursday’s surprise Xbox Cloud Gaming launch on the Meta Quest 3, I've spent most (read: too much) of my evenings trying the service out. And while it doesn’t hold a candle to my more traditional 4K TV and console setup from a technical perspective, its portability more than makes up for that.
For the uninitiated, Xbox Cloud Gaming is basically Netflix for video games. For a monthly fee of $16.99 / £12.99 / AU$18.95, you can stream titles from a massive catalog of content to your phone, PC, Xbox console, and now Meta Quest 3, Quest 2, and Quest Pro. The advantage, of course, is you don’t need super powerful hardware to play the latest games – they’re run on high-end machines many hundreds (maybe thousands) of miles away and just use your device as a screen and a relay for your controller inputs.
