• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Is the xcloud good for gamers with no time?

BootsLoader

Banned
Like many of us nowadays, I also don’t have much time for gaming, relationship, work, everyday tasks, you name it. I was thinking about trying xcloud. I have an iPad 9,7 (don’t remember which model it is). So I registered on xcloud and thought of giving it a shot (please note that I am a PlayStation bitch).

My thinking is that I will game whenever possible on iPad with 4G or 5G that comes from my phone to my tablet. I want to play single player games only and not multiplayer. But I don’t know if it’s worth it shelling out 20$ just to find out that it is not working for me. Unfortunately Microsoft did not offer any trial month so I don’t know how to check it out.

The only game that I managed to play is Fortnite because it is free, but I didn’t like the performance, on the other hand I want to try a single player game also.

What do you think, is it worth it trying to game on Xcloud on tablet? Small bursts here and there (when there is available time)? Is xcloud worth it at all? Need your light!
 

Banjo64

cumsessed
Tried it, but no. Not IMO.

It’s not convenient to tether a controller to my phone/tablet.

The touch screen controls are too complex (too many buttons in a small space on a flat screen with no tactile feedback).

I tried to play a relatively simple game, Goldeneye, and couldn’t get past the first few levels.

I’d say play some good dedicated mobile games (yea, they exist) and get a Switch or Deck for some casual or quick fire games like Hades.
 

Mowcno

Member
If your specific connection and setup works well then yes. Though even with the perfect connection, location, signal etc the visual quality of Xcloud is still poor. They use a lower bitrate than other cloud gaming providers.

Currently for me cloud gaming is too hit and miss with my own home internet. It can work great for a while and then crap the bed. Latency is never the problem for me in that regards games feel native, no input lag. But stability is an issue for me.
 

Aion002

Member
Depending on the time it is.

Early in the morning it works flawlessly, other times in the week it may vary (from perfect to some queues) and in the weekends, specially at night, get ready to wait around 20 minutes queues.


I have a friend that in the beginning of this year decided to use only xcloud for games... Initially he was impressed, but after the GTAV release on gamepass he said that the queues got worse and worse and now he plans to get a Series X on black friday.
 

Skifi28

Member
It's wives and husbands that aren't good for gaming. Sleep has to go too. Then you have all the time you need.
 

Beer Baelly

Al Pachinko, Konami President
Kenan Thompson Pca GIF by E!
 

reinking

Gold Member
It is hard to answer questions about streaming services because everyone's experience is a bit different dependent on their connection. If you are looking into those services, you might also want to give GeForce Now a try. I have not tried it in years but I know people that have had better streaming results with it.
 

Topher

Gold Member
It's fine for some games. I played a good chunk of Octopath Traveler on xCloud while on a business trip. Sea of Stars should be good as well. I haven't had good experiences with fast paced games on xcloud though. Of course, depends on location.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
What do you mean. I literally don’t have time. I’m not making this up myself.
Do You have kids or something? Even with kids, you should find some time.
hell, even Elon musk has level 100 character in diablo 4.

Are you building a home now or something? That + kids can consume all the time possible.

I am 34, have wife, my own flat and NO KIDS. I can game all the time :p
Get roomba to clean for you, dishwasher to do the dishes and better wife to do the laundry. done
 
Last edited:

BootsLoader

Banned
Ok, I decided to pass on cloud gaming. According to the posts here it is not a good choice. Thank you very much for your comments.
I would like something more stable than “hit or miss” or “depending on location or other factors”.
I have a psp and a 3Ds, I know they are pretty outdated, I will wait and maybe buy the next Steam Deck or Switch 2.
 

BootsLoader

Banned
Do You have kids or something? Even with kids, you should find some time.
hell, even Elon musk has level 100 character in diablo 4.

Are you building a home now or something? That + kids can consume all the time possible.

I am 34, have wife, my own flat and NO KIDS. I can game all the time :p
Get roomba to clean for you, dishwasher to do the dishes and better wife to do the laundry. done
Well, you are Superman. I have 1 kid. The kid is not a problem, just many things are changing rapidly in my life and more will change in the next year. I will have to find a second job also. 🤣🤣🤣 Oh dear.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
Well, you are Superman. I have 1 kid. The kid is not a problem, just many things are changing rapidly in my life and more will change in the next year. I will have to find a second job also. 🤣🤣🤣 Oh dear.
Well a good job really is the basis of it unfortunately.
If You are having a hard time with 1 job now, then I am hoping you can find a better paid job later :)

My job is pretty ok for polish standard. Trash for EU/USA standard but I live in a small apartment without kids and throw all my money at games. So yeah. My priorities arent exactly great but I do what I like :p
 

BootsLoader

Banned
Well a good job really is the basis of it unfortunately.
If You are having a hard time with 1 job now, then I am hoping you can find a better paid job later :)

My job is pretty ok for polish standard. Trash for EU/USA standard but I live in a small apartment without kids and throw all my money at games. So yeah. My priorities arent exactly great but I do what I like :p
Haha, nice, then consider yourself free and lucky, keep at it, don’t lose your freedom.
 
I would go with Geforce now. Since the Starfield release I could not play a single time Xcloud, because there are always long waiting times. And the quality is also significantly better with Geforce now.
A friend of mine just got the GFN tier with the RTX 4080 & PC Game Pass and honestly it was a much better experience than xCloud via GPU. It's of course more expensive, but the quality of the stream and the very low latency is miles ahead of what MS is providing right now with xCloud.
 

Rockondevil

Member
I’ve used it a handful of times and the experience hasn’t been to bad to be honest.
Two weeks ago I was playing Starfield on my phone for a few hours and it worked fine.
I’ve found the only issues I ever have is when I pause for a minute or so then come back to it it’ll stutter for a few seconds.

Further back I was playing that Potion craft game.
Haven’t tested multiplayer games though, so that could be a whole different story.

I should also point out I’m Australian and we have dog shit internet.

It’s not convenient to tether a controller to my phone/tablet.
What tablet/phone have you got?
I just double tap the sync button on my Xbox controller and it’ll switch between by Xbox and iPhone/iPad.
The Xbox controllers remember two syncs so you can just double tap the sync button back and forward between the devices.
 

Mr Reasonable

Completely Unreasonable
Works fine for me but I have on occasion had wait times since Starfield came out. I wouldn't play a fast shooter or 1v1 fighter with it because there inevitably going to be a delay, and there's a noticable drop in visual quality versus playing a locally installed game.

I'm surprised you can't sign up for a 2 week trial somehow, you should be able to get a code from somewhere either here from someone buying a console or from a code site.
 
I just played fable 1+2 on xcloud on WiFi without any noticeable drops.
I got GeForcenow to play gears5 and it was awesome on the 4K tier.

BUT I would not give up my local gaming for full cloud yet cause I want to choose what to play and the games are all over the place on different platforms.
 
Last edited:

StereoVsn

Member
IMO, a handheld like the Deck or ROG Ally is a better bet.

You can play a lot of games locally and if you really want to stream, can fire up NVidia GeForce, Xcloud, etc…
 

X-Wing

Member
It strongly depends on your location and how good your connection to the servers is. Where I live I have an excellent experience streaming from PlayStation Plus but xCloud simply isn't playable due to the lag and compression artifacts but while traveling I had countries where the experience was reversed.
 

Sorcerer

Member
It's laughably bad on a fiber connection. I can't begin to imagine how unplayable it would be over 4g/5g.
It must be a location thing. I am in NJ, with pretty crappy internet, and it used to work perfectly for me. Get in in seconds, no lag, it was beautiful. Now it's completely ruined with waiting in a cue. So much for Microsoft investing in this as the future of gaming. Great when no one was using it, but you are screwed if a popular release is in Gamepass. The other thing I think is bad is if it's inactive for a couple of minutes you get kicked, I always leave the room due to other distractions so that really was a downer.
When I could get in recently, I tried Gotham Knights and it ran perfectly.
 
Last edited:
It all depends on your specific internet connection, your tolerance to input lag, and how close you are to one of the xcloud servers, I've had no issues in the small amount I've played but some people have miserable experiences too. I'd say try playing it once for a somewhat extended period of time and see if it seems worth it to you, it's one of those things where it's hard for anybody to give you an informed opinion given all the variables involved
 

BootsLoader

Banned
It all depends on your specific internet connection, your tolerance to input lag, and how close you are to one of the xcloud servers, I've had no issues in the small amount I've played but some people have miserable experiences too. I'd say try playing it once for a somewhat extended period of time and see if it seems worth it to you, it's one of those things where it's hard for anybody to give you an informed opinion given all the variables involved
I’m currently in Germany, not sure how close I am to a server, I will stay here for some months. So needed something to game on.
 
Top Bottom