Microsoft has quietly revealed that the Xbox Cloud Gaming platform is now rolling out in India. The company hasn"t made any widespread announcements about this region expansion just yet, with only a post on the Xbox India Facebook page confirming the arrival so far. It appears a launch event has happened in India involving local content creators as well.
Gamers in India with Xbox Game Pass Essential, Premium, or Ultimate subscriptions should now be able to enjoy Xbox Cloud Gaming without jumping through any hoops. Users are already claiming vastly improved latency to servers thanks to the upgrade too.
"We’re excited to announce Xbox Cloud Gaming is now available in India, enabling players to stream and play hundreds of titles on the devices they already own, whether it"s on an Xbox console, PC, handheld, mobile phone, select LG and Samsung Smart TVs, or compatible Amazon Fire TV Sticks or Fire TV Cube," says a statement from Microsoft (via Mashable). "This launch marks India as Xbox’s 29th cloud gaming market—a major step in our mission to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone on the planet."
While Microsoft hiked the prices of all Xbox Game Pass tiers last month and shuffled some games around, it also expanded cloud gaming to the cheaper subscriptions. Right now in India, Xbox Game Pass Essential costs ₹499 ($5.63) a month with access to over 50 games, while Xbox Game Pass Premium lands at ₹699 ($7.89), touting over 200 games. The Xbox Game Pass Ultimate plan unlocks everything with access to over 400 games as well as day-one drops for ₹1389 ($15.68) a month.
The company is also slowly rolling out its "Stream what you own" feature to more games, letting subscribers jump into titles from their personal library via the cloud that may not be a part of the Game Pass just yet.
It looks like two server clusters are available in the region for players to connect to, depending on their location: Central India and South India. Don"t forget that Fortnite is free to try over Xbox Cloud Gaming without any subscription requirements, which could be used to test out the service.