Xbox’s cloud gaming is available to subscribers of Game Pass, a Netflix-like catalogue service offering a selection of games to subscribers. Image for representation purposes.
Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox is launching cloud gaming for users in India, the firm announced on Tuesday (November 11, 2025). Cloud gaming allows 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. Xbox, which is one of the main players in the console gaming space, has offered cloud gaming in most of its major markets; India is the 29th market to get the feature.
Xbox’s cloud gaming is available to subscribers of Game Pass, a Netflix-like catalogue service offering a selection of games to subscribers; prices range from ₹499–1,389 a month plus taxes. The main competitor to Game Pass is Sony’s PlayStation Plus, which is priced at up to ₹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 a distribution deal with Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) maker Krafton. OnePlay is another firm that offers cloud gaming. Xbox is, however, the largest firm to take a crack at the medium, with a 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 that is capable of playing the most demanding of games (from a hardware point of view) than it is to simply 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.
Microsoft may well be aware of that challenge — the firm’s Xbox consoles have not been available from its authorised retailers for several weeks in India. “We have to cater to the market,” Arjun Varma, who heads Xbox’s strategic expansion in India, said. “What gamers in India want, what gives them value… We want to offer them choice and flexibility. They want to play across a range of devices, it’s a mobile first market.” The Xbox hardware’s availability would be subject to “market forces,” Mr. Varma said.
Cloud gaming requires data packets to make round trips extremely quickly, something that is measured by a metric called latency. 30 millisecond latency is generally accepted as an upper limit for a smooth cloud gaming experience. Mobile networks, even high speed 5G ones, are generally 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 fiber broadband, and WiFi connected to home networks, are better capable of handling cloud gaming. Testing of 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 told The Hindu that they were getting, at worst, 22 milliseconds.
Mr. Varma said that Xbox had not yet partnered with a telecom or internet service provider, which may work out some of the latency kinks in some parts of the country. “We are essentially looking at a phased approach in terms of our launch in India,” Mr. Varma said. “Our teams would love to work and understand how we can collaborate with partners in India.” Documents from a court case leaked in 2020 revealed that Xbox was in talks with Jio for cloud gaming, though it appears this partnership did not materialise.
Published – November 12, 2025 08:48 am IST
