There's a way to get xCloud running on Windows 10 and stream Xbox games

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It's only officially available for Android at the moment, but life finds a way.

Ahead of its planned rollout in spring of 2021, Project xCloud—the Xbox game streaming app—is up and running on Windows 10. Late last year a method for downloading a Spanish test version of the relevant app circulated on Twitter and Reddit, and though some users reported that audio didn't work for them or that it was broken by Windows updates, others managed to stream Xbox games available with Game Pass Ultimate on PC.

Ars Technica recently tested it out and found that, at least with a wired connection to the internet, it's possible to stream games like Killer Instinct with a tolerable amount of lag. Most of the games only support gamepad controls rather than keyboard-and-mouse at this stage and run at 1080p, but that's better than you'll get running them on your phone.

You'll need to have a subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to try this yourself, and the test app is updated frequently enough that the download instructions will probably be out of date by the time you read this, so I leave finding them as an exercise for the reader. The YouTube channel Cloud Gaming Xtreme has been keeping on top of it and trying out games like Outriders.

While the games available are mostly cross-platform ones, the backwards-compatible section of Game Pass Ultimate does include some Xbox 360 exclusives. This'll be one way to finally try Fable 2 on PC.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.