Xbox’s newly anointed chief strategy officer, Matthew Ball, has said that the current spike in hardware pricing represents an opportunity for games streaming.
Speaking at The Games Business Live, the executive said that already “a lot more people” have been using the company’s Xbox Cloud Gaming. That being said, Ball emphasised that streaming was only one part of Microsoft’s games strategy.
All of this comes amidst the seismic impact of the AI boom that is having huge ramifications on games hardware pricing. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and Valve have all announced RRP increases for consoles due to market conditions.
“This is a great window for [streaming],” Ball said.
‘It’s a great window because there’s a bunch of outstanding games, we have a shortage of [console] supply, and that is definitely evident in the data. We are seeing a lot more people using the platform. They are trying it. There are, of course, a number of challenges in the market that people are navigating. We feel very strongly about a return to Xbox. We are very clear – I want no mistake around that. At the same time, we feel very fortunate and privileged to have multiple different avenues for players to play. We mentioned earlier that if you want to play on PC, you can do that. It’s not exclusionary, and there are hundreds of millions, billions of people who have access that way.
“We have tens of millions of people on console, and we have the xCloud platform. More people are using it every day. We’ve said that repeatedly over time. There are definitely more people trying it every day. The best part about that is all of the underlying technology, most of which is a network constraint, and that is improving. All of that converges really well.”
Microsoft first teased Project xCloud in October 2018 before rolling out public tests the following year. The full version, dubbed Xbox Cloud Gaming, launched on console in 2020 before coming to PC in 2021.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz in 2022, Pav Bhardwaj, senior global product manager at Xbox Game Pass, said that streaming was a “great alternative” to consoles.
In 2025, Microsoft’s then-games chief Phil Spencer wrote in a LinkedIn post that its cloud streaming business was on the rise.
“Game Pass cloud hours are up 45% compared to this time last year, and console players are streaming 45% more on console and 24% more on other devices,” the former CEO wrote.
At the same event, Ball said that players can expect a “reliable pipeline” of exclusive titles from Xbox in a bid to turn “around the business”.
