Microsoft says more than 10 million people have streamed games on Xbox Cloud Gaming

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

During the company's third-quarter earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that more than 10 million people have streamed games over the company's cloud gaming platform. The figure shared Tuesday indicates that a lot of people are checking out cloud gaming, which is only available as part of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate tier. It is a concrete stat in a field where there have been few, and no one breaks out numbers for Stadia.

Microsoft said in January that Game Pass had 25 million subscribers, which was up from 18 million the year before. We don't know how Microsoft defines a streamed game, how many current subscribers are included in that streamed games count, or how much playtime is required. It's unclear how many people who streamed a game and signed up for a month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will be counted in Microsoft.

You can now stream a large library of Xbox games across a wide range of devices, thanks to Microsoft's investment in Xbox Cloud gaming. I used it to play Psychonauts 2 on my steam deck, and it worked well. The service is fully powered by custom Xbox Series X hardware, which has made it much better to use.

The company has seen strong hardware sales, with the best March sales performance in 11 years for the Xbox, and next- generation consoles becoming more readily available. Microsoft said that revenue for the Xbox is up. Hood warned that Chinese production shutdowns could affect future hardware sales.