Microsoft will let you play Xbox cloud games with a mouse and keyboard: ‘it’s coming’

The newest Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the most demanding games ever made, and yet you can now play it on a shitty PC with the power of Microsoft's cloud. There is only one big hole, you can't play with a mouse and keyboard on the console because it doesn't support gamepads. According to Microsoft Flight Simulator boss Jorg Neumann, mouse and keyboard control is about to change.

Neumann spilled the beans in a Flight Simulator video Q&A, where he says it will be platform-level support, meaning that any Xbox cloud game could offer mouse and keyboard control. Here is my transcript of the most relevant part.

This is a platform level support, so it has nothing to do with us, obviously mouse/keyboard works for our sim. So the platform team is working on this, and no I can’t give a date because it’s the platform team. I don’t know their dates, but it’s coming, and we are also talking about making touch work.

Neumann thinks we might see it as soon as this summer.

I would say it’s in the next months, it’s not weeks, and it might be... I’m hoping it will be done by June or so, but I can’t ever tell. Everybody wants it, I want it, and so... it’s coming.

He suggests that you can tilt your phone to fly in Flight Simulator if you want to.

Microsoft didn't respond to a request for comment immediately.

I'm excited by the idea of playing the game on the go with mouse and keyboard control like I do at my home PC and possibly via the Steam Deck as well. I was able to trick the cloud service into working since it does support mouse and keyboard, even though it didn't work on the steam deck. It also has a gyro, for that matter.

It will be interesting to see how much Microsoft invests in cloud gaming if it is true that it has deemphasized its rival.