More than five years after its debut, Xbox Cloud Gaming is officially leaving beta. “We’re officially removing the beta tag from Xbox Cloud Gaming,” said Dustin Blackwell, Microsoft’s director of gaming and platform communications, in a briefing with The Verge.
The change comes alongside a price hike for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and several key updates. Microsoft is expanding cloud access to additional Game Pass tiers, while Ultimate subscribers will get exclusive improvements to streaming quality, including up to 1440p resolution on select games and devices.
Players first spotted 1440p support in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora last month, with streaming bitrates peaking at 27Mbps—up from the usual 10–17Mbps. The upgrade should cut down on compression artifacts and make streams look sharper. This marks the first major visual improvement to the service since Microsoft upgraded its servers to Xbox Series X-based hardware in 2021.
It’s unclear if new hardware is driving today’s improvements. Microsoft didn’t respond to questions about whether PC-like configurations are being used for the higher-resolution streams.
For the first time, Xbox Cloud Gaming will also extend beyond the Ultimate tier, rolling out to the new Game Pass Essential and Premium plans. That means more Xbox players will be able to stream both titles they own and games in the Game Pass library—a step beyond the free-to-play Fortnite access introduced earlier.
Still, Microsoft has more work to do to catch up with rivals like Nvidia’s GeForce Now, which already supports 4K, higher frame rates, and superior visual fidelity. Bigger leaps may have to wait until the launch of Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox.
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