New Delhi: Microsoft Corporation, Xbox has recently announced and unveiled its cloud gaming for users in India. The firm also announced on November 11, 2025. This Cloud Gaming enables the gamers to render graphics-intensive games remotely, such that it is streamed on their local device in real-time, from phones and tablets to laptops, PCs and some TVs. The Xbox, which is one of the leading players in the console gaming space, has offered cloud gaming in most of its major markets, where India is the 29th market to get the features. Xbox’s cloud gaming is now available to subscribers of Game Pass, a Netflix-like catalogue service offering a selection of games to subscribers at the price range of Rs 499-1,389 a month, plus taxes.
The main competitor of the Game Pass is Sony’s PlayStation Plus, which is priced at up to Rs 849 a month, and does not offer cloud gaming in India at the moment. Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd also offers JioGamesCloud, which it included recently in the distribution deal with the Battlegrounds Mobile India maker Krafton. OnePlay is another firm that provides cloud gaming. Xbox is the largest firm to take a crack at the medium, with the catalogue of new and so-called AAA games by its gaming studio subsidiaries against which other firms may struggle to compete.
Cloud gaming has been both promising and challenging in India. The promise has come from the fact that it is cheaper to get a cloud gaming subscription than it is to purchase or assemble a gaming PC or console capable of playing the most demanding of games, or stream it from a shared server. The challenge comes from the dominance of mobile gaming, which counts hundreds of millions of gamers, leaving little room for console and PC gaming.
Cloud gaming requires data packets to make round-trip times extremely quick, something that is measured by a metric called latency. The 30 millisecond latency is generally accepted as an upper limit for a smooth cloud gaming experience. Mobile networks, even high-speed 5G ones, are usually not able to achieve such a low latency in all cases due to the way Bharti Airtel Ltd., Vodafone Idea Ltd., and Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd’s networks are built. But home fibre broadband, and WiFi connected to home networks, are better capable of handling cloud gaming. Testing the demo equipment at Xbox’s launch on Wednesday at a Microsoft office in Noida showed a 140ms latency, while a Game Pass subscriber in Mumbai reported getting at worst 22 milliseconds.
