Unexpected but welcome announcement: Xbox declares that it will sell its games directly on the Android Play Store. At least in the United States.
Indeed, the Web giant has just suffered a nasty setback, after American justice forced it to open its Android application store to competition. Yet another trial antitrust for Google, of which Microfost is however taking great pride, jumping at the opportunity to make an astonishing announcement: Xbox games are coming to smartphones.
Xbox games playable on Android
The news comes from the president of Xbox herself. Following the US court ruling earlier this week, Sarah Bond took to X to announce that Xbox games will be coming to Android starting in November. “Gamers will be able to play and purchase games directly from the Xbox app on Android”she wrote in her post.
The Verge tried to learn more about the contours of this announcement, but Microsoft is refusing to comment on it for the moment. For example, we do not know if only the United States is affected or if Europe, which already forced Google to give up last spring with the implementation of the Digital Markets Act, is also part of the lot.
Is this really new?
The American media rightly points out that while the announcement is pleasing, it has been years since PlayStation and Steam games were purchased via their smartphone application. Not play them, of course, but at least acquire them in order to play them later on your console or PC. However, until now, only the Xbox application did not offer this possibility.
What changes is the native integration of Xbox Cloud Gaming features into the group’s application. You can imagine: if you can buy Xbox games on your mobile, the latter is not capable of running them in good conditions. It is therefore via the cloud gaming that we will have to discover them. Today, people subscribed to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate already benefit from a large selection of compatible games cloud.
A subscription which we still do not know if it will be necessary to launch games purchased on the Xbox application after this announcement. In short: a case to follow carefully.
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