Xbox Cloud Gaming continues to be a neat bonus for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, but what about those players who don't want to subscribe on a monthly or yearly basis for it, or those who typically reside in "console-first" countries and therefore don't have as much interest in the service?
Xbox CFO Tim Stuart addressed the latter in a talk at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit last month, where he proposed that potential fans in the likes of India and Africa could be offered ads in order to get cloud streaming for free instead.
Here's a bit of what Stuart had to say during the interview, as transcribed by TweakTown:
"For models like Africa, or India, Southeast Asia, maybe places that aren't console-first, you can say, 'hey, do you want to watch 30 seconds of an ad and then get two hours of game streaming?'
Africa is, you know, 50% of the population is 23 years old or younger with a growing disposable income base, all with cell phones and mobile devices, not a lot of high-end disposable income, generally-speaking.
So we can go in with our own business models and say...there's millions and millions of gamers we would never have been able to address there, and now we can go in with our business models."
Of course, there are no guarantees Xbox will put this sort of thing into practice, but Windows Central reports that Microsoft has been surveying Xbox Insider users about this as well recently (and something similar has been spotted in code from the Xbox operating system), so there's a good chance it's in the plans. What kind of form it would take remains to be seen - would it be just for certain countries, or ultimately everyone around the world?
In any case, it wouldn't come as a surprise, as Xbox recently revealed that xCloud is actually the least popular feature of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and most players are accessing it on console as opposed to their phones. If Microsoft is still keen to focus on building xCloud beyond console, it probably needs to come up with some fresh ideas!