Xbox Cloud Gaming gets mouse and keyboard support

[Daniel Sims]

The object of Xbox Cloud Gaming is to make Xbox games more accessible by bringing them to a wider variety of devices. Asobo Studio confirmed mouse and keyboard support is coming to Xbox Cloud Gaming in an interview last week. There is no firm date on the feature, but it's certainly coming. The Microsoft Flight Simulator developer held a long Q&A last week (watch below), right after the flight sim became available on Xbox Cloud.

Flight Simulator head Jorg Neumann started talking about the cloud version of the game along with mouse and keyboard support around eight and a half minutes in.

Neumann said it’s a platform-level feature, so mouse and keyboard on the cloud will work with more than just Flight Simulator. Xbox Cloud Gaming already supports touch controls for some games because not everyone using a mobile device has a controller (Microsoft doesn’t limit controller support to Xbox controllers). By the same token, not everyone streaming games on PC has a controller.

It’s interesting to consider how this would apply across Microsoft’s selection of cloud games.

The games with PC versions may simply switch to their PC control schemes, or they may not since the cloud servers are running on custom Xboxes. Players may simply be able to configure keys to correspond with Xbox controller buttons. Would the cloud add mouse aiming to a first person shooter that has never had a PC version?

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https://www.techspot.com/news/93679-xbox-cloud-gaming-gets-mouse-keyboard-support.html

 

[Dimitriid]

Well it's certainly something that should be the bare minimum. I'd be more impressed about them meaningfully wanting to bring PC gamers along if they include the ability to use mods on the cloud instances.

After all, the point of a container or VM is that while it could have persistence it's also fully isolated so giving access to the "OS" really only gives access to the VM itself and any catastrophic issues can be resolved in minutes by just grabbing a VM backup or just re-deploying the VM and wiping out everything. In fact since it's Azure, you should be able to just have your entire games library installed in just blob storage in an Azure lake so you can just play around with the VM.