It’s also not even necessarily about buying the new box, as this beta underscores: a vast amount of the Game Pass Ultimate library can be booted on your phone. It’s not about that one big next-generation launch game - it’s about thousands of backwards-compatible games, enhanced games and subscription services. You can see that vision outlined in the blog posts around Halo Infinite’s delay. Playing the near-final xCloud beta on mobile, the experience is now so polished that it in itself feels like a next-generation offering.

Instead, Xbox is delivering services - the new hardware almost feels like it exists to support the services, rather than the other way around. The next generation isn’t all about hardware, Microsoft says. This week, a beta of the Xbox ‘xCloud’ game streaming service became available to all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers on Android - and playing it for a few hours has really reinforced what Microsoft’s vision of the future is all about. While Microsoft is undergoing some nasty twists in their next generation plans like the sudden delay of Halo Infinite, in other areas the tech giant’s unique master plan is expanding as planned.

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