The military news site Task and Purpose reports: The U.S. military's youngest branch, the Space Force, just trounced its sibling services, as well the United Kingdom's military, in the second annual Call of Duty Endowment Bowl.

The transatlantic Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War tournament pit eight teams from the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Marine Corps, along with the British Army, Royal Navy, and Royal Air Force, against each other. Each team was captained by a civilian gamer and popular streamer who offered guidance and tips to players in real-time as they vied for the top spot...

The tournament was put on by the Call of Duty Endowment, which has placed more than 77,000 veterans into full-time jobs since its inception in 2009. This year alone, the endowment placed 11,000 veterans in jobs amidst the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

"Space Force isn't even a year old so this may have been their very first win in anything competitive against any of the other services," Dan Goldenberg, the endowment's executive director said during the event, according to Business Insider. "So it's a heck of a great way to start off their history."

Aleksander Kubica is a postdoctoral fellow at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Institute for Quantum Computing. And he's also the winner of the world's first quantum chess tournament. (It's now available for streaming on Twitch, and begins with a clip of the late Stephen Hawking playing a 2016 game against Ant-Man star Paul Rudd.)

"It's a complicated version of regular chess that incorporates the quantum concepts of superposition, entanglement, and interference," explains Ars Technica (in an article shared by John Trumpian): In quantum chess, there are multiple boards on which the pieces exist, and their number is not fixed. Players can perform "quantum moves" as well as regular chess moves; players just need to indicate which type of move they're performing. Any quantum move will create a superposition of boards (doubling the number of possible boards in the superposition with each quantum move), although the player will see a single board representing all boards at the same time. And any individual move acts on all boards at the same time.

Pawns move the same as in regular chess, but other pieces can make either standard moves or quantum moves, such that they can occupy more than one square simultaneously. In a 2016 blog post, Chris Cantwell of Quantum Realm Games offered the example of a white queen performing a quantum move from D1 to D3. "We get two possible boards. On one board the queen did not move at all. On the other, the queen did move. Each board has a 50 percent chance of 'existence'..."
In 2016 Stephen Hawking had played a game of quantum chess against Paul Rudd in a video which also featured both Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, stars of the "Bill and Ted" movies.

Software developer/sys-admin Hawke Robinson is the CEO of RPG Research, a 501(c)3 non-profit, volunteer-run, charitable organization founded in 1977.

He's also long-time Slashdot reader kmleon, and shares this story from the gaming-news site The Gamer: RPG Research recently sent out an urgent call requesting more volunteers, more warehouse space, and more donations to help meet the overwhelming demand it is currently facing. In a truly good news/bad news situation, the organization has seen donations increase by 600% from previous years, while 2020 has increased demand for the organization's programs by more than 1,000%.

The increased demand is simply more than RPG Research is currently staffed and equipped to handle, resulting in the call for aid. Along with the need for more volunteers, RPGR is also seeking a sizeable warehouse to house office space, events, the RPG Museum, as well as to hold the RPG bus and trailers. The ideal warehouse being sought is "a 2,000 (minimum) to 4,000+ square foot warehouse" somewhere "in the greater Spokane Washington or Post Falls Idaho region...."

The international (six continents) organization began studying roleplaying games and their effects in 1983, and since then have presented their findings through various programs in educational settings, prison systems, and therapeutic medical settings.

"On Friday, Nintendo and Universal Studios Japan took the veil off a years-in-the-making project: the very first Nintendo-themed theme park," reports Ars Technica (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader mprindle): And who better to introduce the world to this life-sized walk through of all things Mario than the character's creator himself, longtime Nintendo developer and designer Shigeru Miyamoto...

Many of the park's decorations and objects can be interacted with by park visitors who wear a special wristband, dubbed the Power-Up Band, which includes an Amiibo-like NFC chip. Press its sensor near park objects like a Super Mario coin block, and a new virtual item will appear in a synced Super Nintendo World app on your smartphone. Exactly how these virtual items will affect your visit to Super Nintendo World remains unclear, but Miyamoto-san hinted to surprising attractions and hidden interactable panels for park visitors to discover in person. (Additionally, those Power-Up Bands will double as Amiibo for compatible hardware, like Nintendo Switch.)

Only one "ride" received a showcase in the video, albeit a brief one: a Mario Kart race against Bowser. It's hosted inside a replica of Bowser's castle, and visitors will sit in one of a series of Mario-styled go-karts that appear to be linked on a rollercoaster-like track, as opposed to freely controllable. Exactly what visitors will see on that ride remains unclear, but previous news about the ride's augmented reality (AR) elements was reinforced with the first official look at the park's AR glasses, which come attached to a Super Mario hat.
The park opens in Japan on February 4, 2021, according to Ars, followed by later launches at Universal Studios in in Singapore, and at its U.S. locations in Orlando, Florida and Los Angeles.

Microsoft is following Sony's move and offering Cyberpunk 2077 refunds to anyone who has purchased the game digitally. It is not however pulling the game from the Microsoft Store. The Verge reports: "We know the developers at CD Projekt Red have worked hard to ship Cyberpunk in extremely challenging circumstances," explains a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "However, we also realize that some players have been unhappy with the current experience on older consoles. To date, we have granted refunds to the vast majority of customers who have requested one. To ensure that every player is able to get the experience they expect on Xbox, we will be expanding our existing refund policy to offer full refunds to anyone who purchased Cyberpunk 2077 digitally from the Microsoft Store, until further notice."

If you're interested in a Microsoft Store refund, you can follow the steps on Microsoft's support page.

An award-winning Taiwanese horror game was removed from storefronts by the beleaguered developer CD Projekt Red amid a backlash from Chinese gamers, hours after it was put on sale. From a report: Devotion, a PC game that chronicles the life of a Taiwanese family in a religious cult in the 1980s, was released to critical acclaim in February 2019. But shortly after release, Chinese players found a poster hanging in the apartment that serves as the games' setting that said "Xi Jinping Winnie-the-Pooh moron." Almost 10,000 negative reviews soon flooded the game's review page. The developer, Red Candle Games, posted an apology saying it was "purely an accident" that the poster was left in the game.

Within a week, however, the game was pulled from sale on the digital storefront Steam. It has not been available in English since, despite winning multiple game of the year awards at the end of 2019, and an ongoing campaign for it to return to sale. On Wednesday, Red Candle Games announced that was changing. The game would be published on Friday by GOG, the digital storefront run by the Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red, it said in a tweet at 10am. A fresh wave of opprobrium from Chinese internet users followed the announcement and less than six hours later, CDPR reversed its decision. "Earlier today, it was announced that the game Devotion is coming to GOG," the company tweeted. "After receiving many messages from gamers, we have decided not to list the game in our store." It gave no further explanation and did not respond to a request for comment. Like many PC gaming firms, GOG operates in a grey area in China.

Rebellion is in the air at Polish video game publisher CD Projekt after the company's highly anticipated, and thrice-delayed, latest title was released to scathing reviews about glitches. Bloomberg News reports: Frustrated and angry staff fired questions at the board during an internal video meeting Thursday that opened with management apologizing for Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch, according to two people who were present. It was a fitting atmosphere for a company whose slogan, plastered on posters all around its Warsaw office, is "We are rebels." Developers asked blunt questions about the company's reputation, the game's unrealistic deadlines and the relentless overtime in the months and years leading up to the game's Dec. 10 release. The meeting took place before Sony's shocking announcement that it was pulling Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and will offer full refunds to any customer who requests one. During the staff meeting, CD Projekt's directors said they had come to an arrangement with Sony but didn't offer specifics. In a Twitter post on Friday, the company said that "following our discussion with PlayStation, a decision was made to temporarily suspend digital distribution" of the game.

Sony is pulling Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and offering full refunds for anyone who bought the game from the digital storefront, the company said on Thursday. The Verge reports: If you want to start a refund, Sony says to visit this site and sign into your PlayStation account to submit a request. The game has already been removed from the PlayStation Store for a few Verge staffers on their PS5s, and the game doesn't come up in a search for "Cyberpunk 2077" on the web version of the store.

Players have found that Cyberpunk 2077, which has only been out for a week, has been riddled with bugs. The game looks good on PS5, but in my few hours with the game, I've run into a few complete crashes to the PS5's home screen and a number of distracting visual glitches. On PS4, the game fares a lot worse -- Eurogamer reported poor performance, low framerate, and texture pop-in. Further reading: 'Cyberpunk 2077' Players Are Fixing Parts of the Game Before CD Projekt

Computer programs that automate online tasks, called bots, have aligned with the coronavirus pandemic and low inventories of hot products to create a perfect storm of holiday disappointment -- or opportunity, depending on your perspective. From a report: On Black Friday, when it launched a deal on the console, Walmart.com says it blocked more than 20 million bot attempts in the sale's first 30 minutes. Target says it's constantly tracking and blocking bots, focusing on high-demand products such as the PS5. One British retailer called Very said it canceled at least 1,000 game console orders after it realized they were placed by bots. Using shopping bots to buy these products is perfectly legal in the United States, despite flustering retailers and stoking annoyance for customers like Coleman. Some bot operators are modern scalpers, in it to make money by forcing Santa to pay market prices. Others are computer-savvy shoppers now turning to bots out of desperation to fill their own gift lists.

Shopping bots aren't new, but their use is growing fast. Deployed by people who buy and resell tickets, high-end sneakers and designer fashion, they're now expanding into other categories where demand outstrips supply -- including grocery delivery slots at the height of the pandemic. Imperva, a cybersecurity firm, says that among its clients, "bad bots" accounted for 24.1 percent of all traffic in 2019 -- up from 20.4 percent in 2018. Bots are only one part of the PS5 crunch -- there have even been daring heists. But stopping the use of bots is easier said than done in an Internet economy that connects so many different interests: companies that want to make highly sought-after products and early adopters who will do anything to get them.

Six Scottish National Party (SNP) politicians have put forward a motion for consideration in the UK parliament to prohibit the resale of games consoles and PC components at prices "greatly above" MSRP, and the resale of goods purchased using automated bots to be made illegal in these fair isles. PC Gamer reports: A motion on the "Resale of gaming consoles and computer components purchases by automated bots" has been tabled with UK Parliament, and it aims to outlaw resellers' usage of automated bots and make it difficult to sell in-demand tech at prices far exceeding the manufacturer's recommend retail price. The motion has no set date for debate in the Commons, and is what is known as an 'Early Day Motion.' These don't often receive much love in Parliament, often due to the sheer number of Early Day Motions going at any one time, but they are used to highlight specific issues present in society. That's hardly indicative of sweeping change in the near-future, but it's better than nothing.

Google's cloud gaming service now supports the iPhone and iPad. As expected, the company is using a web app to access the service. From a report: Google also says that you need to update to iOS 14.3, the latest iOS update that was released earlier this week. If you want to try it out with a free or paid Stadia account, you can head over to stadia.google.com from your iOS device. Log in to your Google account, add a shortcut to your home screen and open the web app. After that, you can launch a game and start playing. Most games will require a gamepad, so you might want to pair a gamepad with your iPhone or iPad as well. Apple's iOS supports Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers using Bluetooth as well as controllers specifically designed for iOS. You can also play with the Stadia controller, but it's optional. If you just want to check your inventory quickly, Stadia on iOS also supports touch controls.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: GameStop employees across the country were caught by surprise on Saturday when the video-game chain suddenly announced new shipments of the highly coveted PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles, sending customers flocking to stores. Workers at the U.S. retailer, speaking to Bloomberg and posting on social media, said they had received little notice for the restock and that the crowds were both chaotic and a risk to their health. The latest generation devices from Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have been in short supply since their release last month, leaving gamers everywhere eager for the latest restock. On Saturday afternoon, GameStop told customers that new inventory was arriving, but that it would only be available to pre-order in stores, not online, where scalpers have dominated digital queues. However, employees found out less than an hour before the public, according to GameStop staffers, which left them unprepared for the rush of customers.

One GameStop manager on the East Coast shared an email from the company, sent just a few minutes before the public announcement, saying that their store would have about 15 new consoles available for pre-order. Minutes after the announcement, the manager said, the store had a crowd of about 40 people, violating social-distancing requirements and overwhelming their clerks. GameStop said its last-minute notification to customers was meant to ensure that individuals, not resellers, were able to purchase the consoles. "We realize that in some situations our approach of notifying customers of this opportunity may have caused unintended reactions from both our associates and customers," GameStop said in a statement. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."

The rush occurred as GameStop is facing widespread staffing shortages as the retailer has asked stores across the country to cut hours, the manager said. GameStop, which has been struggling in recent years amid the widespread adoption of digital games, reported a disappointing third quarter last week, sending the stock falling as much as 22%. The retailer has shuttered almost 700 stores this year and will close more locations through 2022 while it continues to cut costs, although it expects to see a sales bump this quarter thanks to the new consoles. On Reddit, GameStop employees are sharing similar complaints, telling stories of big lines and unruly crowds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The board of directors for British developer Codemasters has reached a purchase agreement with Electronic Arts which would sell the company to the mega-publisher for an estimated $1.2 billion (or just under $8 a share) in early 2021. The deal would put Codemasters' popular racing-game franchises -- including DiRT/DiRT Rally, Grid, F1, and Project CARS (which Codemasters acquired in 2019) -- under the same umbrella as EA's Need for Speed, Burnout, and mobile-focused Real Racing. That's not quite a monopoly in the genre -- thanks in large part to console exclusives like Microsoft's Forza Motorsport and Sony's Gran Turismo -- but it's as close as you're likely to find for any major genre in gaming.

More than that, the acquisition reflects a continuing trend toward consolidation among the game industry's biggest publishers. The acquisition would also likely make Codemaster's current and future titles part of the EA Play subscription service and, by extension, part of Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Aside from its modern racing sims, Codemasters boasts a legacy catalog going back to the days of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, with titles like Micro Machines and the Dizzy platform-adventure series that were especially popular in the UK. "The combination of Codemasters and Electronic Arts will enable the development and delivery of a market-leading portfolio of creative and exciting racing games and content to more platforms and more players around the world," the companies said in a joint statement.

"Electronic Arts and Codemasters have a shared ambition to lead the video game racing category," Codemasters Chairman Gerhard Florin added. "The Board of Codemasters firmly believes the company would benefit from EA's knowledge, resources and extensive global scale -- both overall and specifically within the racing sector. We feel this union would provide an exciting and prosperous future for Codemasters, allowing our teams to create, launch and service bigger and better games to an extremely passionate audience."

Cyberpunk 2077 is here in all its glory and pain. On some machines, it's a visual spectacle pushing the limits of current technology and delivering on the promise of Deus Ex, but open world. On other machines, including last-gen consoles, it's a unoptimized and barely playable nightmare. Developer CD Projekt Red has said it's working to improve the game, but fans already have a number of fixes, particularly if you're using an AMD CPU. From a report: Fans aren't waiting for the developer however and over the weekend AMD CPU users discovered that a few small tweaks could improve performance on their PCs. Some players reported performance gains of as much as 60 percent. Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be a CPU intensive game and, at release, it isn't properly optimized for AMD chips. "If you run the game on an AMD CPU and check your usage in task manager, it seems to utilise 4 (logical, 2 physical) cores in frequent bursts up to 100% usage, whereas the rest of the physical cores sit around 40-60%, and their logical counterparts remain idle," Redditor BramblexD explained in a post on the /r/AMD subreddit. Basically, Cyberpunk 2077 is only utilizing a portion of any AMD chips power.

Digital Foundry, a YouTube channel that does in-depth technical analysis of video games, noticed the AMD issue as well. "It really looks like Cyberpunk is not properly using the hyperthreads on Ryzen CPUs," Digital Foundry said in a recent video. To fix this issue, the community has developed three separate solutions. One involves altering the game's executable with a hex editor, the other involves editing a config file, and a third is an unofficial patch built by the community. All three do the same thing -- unleash the power of AMDs processors. "Holy shit are you a wizard or something? The game is finally playable now!" One redditor said of the hex editing technique. "With this tweak my CPU usage went from 50% to ~75% and my frametime is so much more stable now."

The Wall Street Journal looks back to the days when Windows was "a loser in the world of computer games." But to change that, Eric Engstrom and his cohorts "secretly hired programmers to get the work done, and they had to do an end run around partners like Intel," remembers VentureBeat.

Long-time Slashdot reader whh3 shares The Wall Street Journal's report: Windows inserted itself between game programs and the computer hardware in a way that slowed down graphics and animation. Game developers vastly preferred the DOS operating system, which didn't gum up their special effects. That created an opportunity for three Microsoft misfits — Eric Engstrom, Alex St. John and Craig Eisler. Mr. Engstrom, who died Dec. 1 at the age of 55, and his pals formed one of several factions within Microsoft trying to solve the game problem. Openly contemptuous of colleagues who didn't share their ideas, they were so obnoxious that Brad Silverberg, who ran the Windows business, dubbed them the Beastie Boys. He had to fend off frequent demands for their dismissal.

Yet the solution they developed, DirectX, beat anything else on offer inside Microsoft. DirectX software recognized games and allowed them direct access to the computer's graphical capabilities, allowing a richer game experience than DOS could. "It was brilliant," Mr. Silverberg said. Launched in 1995, DirectX wowed game developers and led to a flood of new games for computers loaded with Windows. That success emboldened Microsoft to plunge deeper into the lucrative gaming market by developing the Xbox console.

Microsoft's game business produced $11.6 billion of revenue in the year ended June 30...

"He thought things were possible that nobody else on the planet thought would be possible," said Ben G. Wolff, a friend who runs a robotics company, "and sometimes he'd be right."
"DirectX remains the foundation for many games on Windows 10 and the Xbox Series X," writes Engadget, "and it's likely to remain relevant for years to come."

And VentureBeat shared this remark from Alex St. John at a memorial service for Engstrom. "He had huge dreams and huge fantasies, and he always took us all with him."

The annual Game Awards ceremony awarded this year's "Best Direction" award to Naughty Dog studio's The Last of Us Part II — provoking a strong reaction from Kotaku's staff writer.

"I think it's pretty obvious that no game that required its developers to crunch, like The Last of Us Part II did, should be given a Best Direction award." It's no secret that Naughty Dog subjected its workers to unbelievable levels of crunch to get The Last of Us Part II out the door, but that's hardly an innovation when it comes to Naughty Dog or game development in general. Over the years, the studio has seen constant employee turnover as developers crunch on games like The Last of Us and Uncharted, burn out, and throw in the towel. Relentless overtime, missed weekends, long stretches of time without seeing your family — these things take a toll on even the most passionate artist.

"This can't be something that's continuing over and over for each game, because it is unsustainable," one The Last of Us Part II developer told Kotaku earlier this year. "At a certain point you realize, 'I can't keep doing this. I'm getting older. I can't stay and work all night.'"

Let's be clear: the existence of crunch indicates a failure in leadership. It's up to game directors and producers to ensure workloads are being managed properly and goals are being met. If workers are being forced to crunch, explicitly or otherwise, it means the managers themselves have fallen short somewhere, either in straining the limits of their existing staff, fostering an environment where overtime is an implied (if unspoken) requirement, or both. And as ambitious as The Last of Us Part II director Neil Druckmann and his projects may be, "questionable experiments in the realm of pushing human limits" are not required to make a great game...

I feel like the industry, now more than ever, is willing to discuss the dangers of crunch culture and solutions to eradicate it. But lavishing praise on the way The Last of Us Part II was directed feels like a tacit endorsement of crunch and only serves to push that conversation to the backburner again. A popular online statement, first coined by Fanbyte podcast producer Jordan Mallory, says, "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding." The message from all those who share it is clear: No game, not even industry darling The Last of Us Part II, is worth destroying lives to create.

The success of Nintendo's diminutive gadget led to a flurry of copycats, from a tiny Commodore 64 to a miniaturised Sony PlayStation. Some were good; many were flawed, with the play experience only being surface deep. Fortunately, some companies wanted to go further than fashioning yet another miniature plug-and-play TV console. From a report: One, the ZX Spectrum Next, brought into being a machine from an alternate universe in which Sinclair was never sold to Amstrad and instead built a computer to take on the might of the Amiga and Atari ST. Two other companies headed further back into gaming's past and set themselves an equally ambitious challenge: recreating the exciting, noisy, visually arresting classic cabinets you once found in arcades. "I always saw them as more than just a game, with their unique shapes, art, sounds and lights acting together to lure money from your pocket," explains Matt Precious, managing partner at Quarter Arcades creators Numskull Designs. "I was disappointed you couldn't purchase models of these machines during a time when physical items like LPs were booming in an increasingly sterile world of digital downloads."

Quarter Arcades was subsequently born as a project "trying to capture a piece of gaming history" in quarter-scale cabinets. The machines are in exact scale, including the controls, and play the original arcade ROMs. But look closer and there's an obsessive level of detail: the rough texture of the control panel art; mimicking an original cab's acoustics by careful speaker positioning; recreating the Space Invaders 'Pepper's ghost' illusion effect where graphics 'float' above an illuminated backdrop -- all realised by dismantling and reverse-engineering original cabs.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More recent Nvidia graphics cards have a proprietary feature called Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and while it's often been touted as a powerful new rendering tool, the results have sometimes been underwhelming. Some of this is down to the oddly mixed-message around how DLSS was rolled-out: it only works on more recent Nvidia cards that are still near the cutting edge of PC graphics hardware⦠but DLSS is designed to render images at lower resolutions but display them as if they were rendered natively at a higher resolution. If you had just gotten a new Nvidia card and were excited to see what kind of framerates and detail levels it could sustain, what DLSS actually did sounded counterintuitive. Even games like Control, whose support of DLSS was especially praised, left me scratching my head about why I would want to use the feature. On my 4K TV, Control looked and ran identically well with and without DLSS, so why wouldn't I just max-out my native graphics settings instead rather than use a fancy upscaler? Intellectually, I understood the DLSS could produce similarly great looking images without taxing my hardware as much, but I neither fully believed it, nor had I seen a game where the performance gain was meaningful.

Cyberpunk 2077 converted me. DLSS is a miracle, and without it there's probably no way I would ever have been happy with my graphics settings or the game's performance. I have a pretty powerful video card, an RTX 2080 TI, but my CPU is an old i5 overclocked to about 3.9 GHz and it's a definite bottleneck on a lot of games. Without DLSS, Cyberpunk 2077 was very hard to get running smoothly. The busiest street scenes would look fine if I were in a static position, but a quick pan with my mouse would cause the whole world to stutter. If I was walking around Night City, I would get routine slow-downs. Likewise, sneaking around and picking off guards during encounters was all well and good but the minute the bullets started flying, with grenades exploding everywhere and positions changing rapidly, my framerate would crater to the point where the game verged on unplayable. To handle these peaks of activity, I had to lower my detail settings way below what I wanted, and what my hardware could support for about 80 percent of my time with the game. Without DLSS, I never found a balance I was totally happy with. The game neither looked particularly great, nor did it run very well. DLSS basically solved this problem for me. With it active, I could run Cyberpunk at max settings, with stable framerates in all but the busiest scenes.

Microsoft has made available two different Windows 10 test builds today, one of which includes the promised x64 app emulation for Arm, among other features. ZDNet reports: The RS_Prerelease build 21277 -- which ultimately is expected to be designated as the "Cobalt" branch -- includes the features Microsoft had previously been testing but removed at the end of October. This includes the updated emoji picker, redesigned touch keyboard, voice typing, theme-aware splash screens and more. It also provides the aforementioned Arm emulation support. Currently, Windows on Arm natively supports Arm apps, including ARM64 versions. But so far, only 32-bit Intel (x86) apps are supported in emulation. This lack of x64 emulation has limited the number of apps that can run on Windows on Arm devices, since apps that are 64-bit only have only been available on Windows on Arm (WoA) devices if and when developers created native versions of them. As of now, these x64 Arm apps also can run in emulation. More details on the x64 Arm emulation preview functionality are in this Microsoft post.

Microsoft has shared some details about the roadmap for its cloud gaming service. In addition to Android devices, the company confirms that it plans to add support for more platforms. In Spring 2021, Microsoft will launch its cloud gaming service on iOS and on computers. From a report: Originally called Project xCloud, Microsoft's cloud gaming service lets you play Xbox games on non-Xbox devices. The games run on a server in a data center near you. The video is streamed to your device, and your interactions are relayed to the server in real time. Xbox cloud gaming isn't a separate subscription. People who subscribe to the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for $14.99 per month can access cloud gaming as part of their subscription. The plan also includes access to a library of games, EA Play and Xbox Live Gold. When it comes to new devices, you'll soon be able to launch a game on Xbox cloud gaming from a PC. The service will be available in the Xbox app and using a web browser.