Xbox has been discussing bringing Game Pass Ultimate library to smart TVs for at most one year. It's finally happening in 2022. The Xbox app will be available on this year's range of Samsung smart TVs and monitors on June 30 which will allow Game Pass Ultimate subscribers to play games from the cloud with no additional hardware, other than the Bluetooth-connected gamepad. Even a PlayStation controller can do the trick.
2022 Samsung smart TV models will support game streaming services such as NVIDIA's GeForce Now and Google Stadia. Samsung launched a new Gaming Hub for its TVs in January, which puts these cloud services in the spotlight, and the Xbox app is scheduled to join them. Xbox is an important player in cloud gaming with over 25 million Game Pass subscribers. However there are a few who are at the Ultimate Tier , which allows streaming capabilities.
The Game Pass Ultimate library has hundreds of games available to stream, and Xbox has made it a point to launch its biggest first-party titles on the service from the beginning. The Xbox app for Samsung devices will be able to support Bluetooth headsets, gamepads, and the DualShock 4 and DualSense PlayStations.
There's no update at present on the dedicated streaming device that Xbox announced it was working on last year, along with the smart TV app.
Xbox has plans to launch more exciting games for Game Pass in the coming months. The company will soon give Ultimate subscribers the option of streaming certain games they have purchased outside of the Game Pass library. It is unclear how exactly this will function. It is likely to apply to games that are not part of Game Pass but remain within the Xbox ecosystem. However, it could also include games from third-party vendors.
A spokesperson for Xbox said that the company will offer the option for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members to play games they like from the cloud. We'll have more to share about the games that will be available by Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) over the course of the next year."
On June 9th, Xbox will bring cloud gaming to Argentina and New Zealand. This includes access the Xbox streaming library, as well as Fortnite. Epic Games partnered with Xbox to bring Fortnite to Xbox Cloud Gaming. It's free to play with no subscription. At the time, Xbox said it was interested in adding more free-to-play titles to its cloud network.
Over the coming year or at least, Xbox plans to test out the system that allows multiple profiles to play the same time with the same Game Pass subscription. That'll be tested in Colombia and Ireland, and Xbox executives are promoting it as an "potential expansion" to Game Pass.
Finally demos of games are coming to Game Pass. In the coming year, Xbox will start rolling out bite-sized, curated pieces of upcoming games in Game Pass, allowing subscribers to test these titles at no cost and provide feedback to developers. The program will concentrate on independent titles at first and Xbox said developers will be compensated for taking part, meaning all the work that goes into creating the demo will be paid for. Project Moorcroft is the name of the demo program. There's no confirmation on whether a Minecraft Project Moorcroft demo will ever drop but it's fun say that regardless.
The new PlayStation Plus subscription service will provide time-limited, free demos of all games. It will compete directly with Game Pass. The new PS Plus will go live on June 13th. Premium is the most expensive tier of the service, gives access to 700 games in the PS Now library and cloud play for some games from previous PlayStation versions. let it sing offered by Sony doesn't support native streaming on mobile devices such as Xbox's, and will not include first-party games until the launch date.
After reports surfaced that Sony made it mandatory for certain game developers to create and publish two-hour demos, without plans to pay them for their work, Sony received negative press. Xbox made it clear that it plans to pay developers to create demos.