So last week I compared the PlayStation Portal, the backbone controller for iPhone and the Steam Deck. And we kind of talked about the pros and cons of each, right? They all work really well.
The PlayStation 1 has the least latency. The backbone is the cheapest. Plus, it has that benefit of being able to connect to Game Pass Ultimate Cloud Gaming. So you can play your Xbox on the go, too. Steam Deck, obviously, you could do the Xbox thing, but it's required a bunch of back end stuff for you to do.
Going into desktop mode, either getting on the browser. or root installing apps and stuff like that. And it's this whole rigmarole that some people don't want to deal with. Right.
But I found out recently that there's an easy way to do Xbox cloud gaming on your steam deck. And so we're going to talk about that today because I thought this was super cool. And it again adds to the value proposition of the steam deck, but Hey, I'm Bobby here.
And please, you know, if you're new here, consider hitting that subscribe button. If you liked this video, hit that like button. It helps support the channel and I appreciate it.
And that helps me get James paid. And that's cool. because games rocks. So we're going to talk about this new way to do this today. It's an app on Steam called XB Play, and we're going to go over it, how it works.
And one little weird thing that you have to do, and I promise I say that, but it takes you about 10 seconds to make sure that you get it working right. So let's check it out. So what you're going to do is you're going to go over to Steam and you're going to search for XB Play on the Steam store. Now, this app is what or this app with this. logo is what you're looking for right it says xb play and i know it's kind of hard to see on this camera it's not the best for filming but it's the only option i have right now so bear with me now i've tried this a little under an hour and this has worked great i do want to preface saying i have very very good internet in my house like gigabit up and down that kind of thing but it's worked like flawlessly for me what you do is you install this right you do have to buy it it is seven dollars us it's 6.99 I believe in the UK it's $5.99 and then in Canada it's probably like $7.99 or $8.99, right?
You do have to pay for this, but the benefits are absolutely worth it. Now, we talked about the weird thing you have to do. When I initially purchased this, it did not show up in my Steam library on the Steam Deck. It shows up on the computer, right? On the desktop, no problem.
But on the Steam Deck it was not showing up. and I did a little bit of research and I found that you have to favorite it. And when you favorite it, it shows up in your favorites list on your Steam Deck.
And so you'll see it there. You can do that, I believe, from the store. But if you search it from the store, you buy it and then you don't see it, just search it from the store again. It will say, hey, you've purchased this already. Then you just go over to the gear icon over here and you can favorite it, I believe, if you only have a Steam Deck and you don't have a PC.
I just favorite it on PC because I was doing the research on PC of why it wasn't working. It popped right up on the Steam Deck after that. And once it did, I got to try it. And let's talk about how it works and how impressive this is.
So what we do is we just launch it just like a normal thing. And it pops up with this Xbox Remote Play thing. And it's going to give us a list right now. I have it to where it logs in automatically for me. But the first thing you need to do is you need to go down to the bottom of this list.
And it says Login right here. It's hard to see, I know. But it says Login.
right and then it says these other options right so up here the two options that we're really concerned with if you're an xbox player and you have an xbox console remote play is going to allow you to connect to your series s or series x and remote play from that right to your steam deck right you have to log into your console hook it up to your console i don't have an xbox console i do all my xbox gaming on pc but you get it set up with that now what i was interested in when i heard about this was the cloud play now the cloud play uh it's the second option up here And it says United States and it says West US. Now I'm in California. So it's registering, hey, the Western US servers are the ones we need to connect you to for the least latency.
And that's what you want to see, something that's ideally close to you. You have to log in first. And if you notice, it says auto log in on startup down here.
And I have that checked, right? I have that checked because I wanted it to just log right in. And I would just suggest you do that. It makes things quicker because otherwise you have to log in every time.
So you do that and you just type on this or you tap on this cloud player, you press the button, right? So I tried a couple of games. Hi-Fi Rush.
I tried this game. Now, I didn't particularly care for this game. I really didn't enjoy it at all when I reviewed it last year.
But I thought, hey, that's a rhythm game, a rhythm combat game. And this is a game that seems like on the go you'd want to be able to play, right? Most people, because a lot of people really loved it.
But I tried it and that was probably the most impressive game, right? Because the latency was so good, at least with my internet connection, that... I was able to consistently hit attacks on the rhythm like you're supposed to in the game.
The latency was so minor that I was able to still string together combos. I did two or three combat encounters and ran partway through a level and stuff. And Rollerdrome as well.
Rollerdrome is kind of a fast-paced game. Right. So I was trying that out and it felt really good. And again, I have gigabit up and down internet. So, you know, your, your results may vary, but what we're going to try is Starfield.
I do Starfield because it's like the big AAA Xbox game right now. Right. You want to kind of see how that's going to perform and I'll show you, it actually performs pretty well. We'll see this. does take a minute i noticed earlier it took a minute this did not take very long last night when i got this working it was about 12 30 or 1 a.m and it didn't take very long to connect but i assume now because i'm recording this in the middle of the day it's about 4 4 15 4 20 p.m pacific time that there's a lot more people that are going to be on the x cloud servers right now so it's going to take a minute okay so now it looks like the game has booted up and that did take about 30 to 40 seconds to kind of do all the checks and get connected for the game But we see that Starfield is booting right up.
And this is a very, very cool thing to have access to. Like if you're one of those people who has a Steam Deck and you like Starfield and you don't necessarily want to waste your battery playing, right? There are ways to move your save file over to Game Pass, right? Install it through Game Pass and then move your save file over to Game Pass so that it has that and it can sync it.
And then you can continue playing for much longer stretches on. cloud streaming versus doing the normal right installed thing now it does mean like you know you can't do mods or anything uh because you don't have access to that on this without going to desktop but that all being said it lets you continue and again play longer or if you're just a person who hasn't played it yet and you find yourself hey i really dig this game you know some people really have loved this game they've been like i played a thousand hours on it i got like 40 and i was like cool I'm kind of done here. We see we're in Aquila, which is, you know, notoriously bad on the frames because there's a lot of stuff going on, but here we see it. It works really well. There's very little latency, right?
You can kind of see if I do this really fast, it'll take a second to turn, but it's not that bad. We can run around, got pretty fine control and it looks great, right? This is one of those games that it looks pretty good, right?
It's even got these little, you know, kind of alleyways you can walk up. But overall, the performance is very, very solid for a game that, you know, on PC, it was struggling for a while. And on consoles, it actually got like a solid 30 FPS, which you want, you know, if you're saying, hey, it's 30 FPS, right?
That's the only thing about Tears of the Kingdom is that sometimes those frame drops are painful. But overall. You see that this is performing fantastically. And really, I'm just walking around. Combat, I assume, would be roughly the same because all the reviews of this, even on Series S, we're noting the fact that, hey, even as big as this is, it doesn't really have issues on the Series S. But here we're just seeing that this new streaming app that was released on Steam is making this seamless.
There's no more of the going... to desktop and then installing this third-party thing like you have to do with like some of the emulators and some of the like chiaki i had to do that with i had to do that playstation 5 right which i would love it if sony did some kind of service like this like i'll pay you for that you know like let me just like do all my streaming directly instead of you know through um through having to have a playstation to stream to right but this is very very impressive uh the developer who did this i think it's just one guy um and it works like seamlessly i mean you're seeing that i'm able i would be able to go and play and uh and yeah really just move around and play the full game of starfield if i wanted and again minimal battery drain now you see my power cables plugged in here but that's because i was playing this quite a bit last night i was playing some uh install like natively installed games as well as emulators i just love the steam deck so much But if you are a Steam Deck enthusiast like I am, and you see this, and you go, you know what, I'll pay. And like I said, I already told a friend of mine earlier about this whole thing.
And I was like, if you're paying the $10 for the PC Game Pass, you can go get a thing from CD Keys for a few bucks, and then pay $7 for this, and you're paying one more dollar to get all this on your Steam Deck, plus everything you've already got on your PC, right? This is like a no-brainer, at least for me. I... consider this money well invested and this right here this is something that will keep me invested in game pass right because if i'm going anywhere or even if i'm just chilling in bed and i go let me see what's on game pass now i can do that on my steam deck i don't have to get up and turn the computer on and like sit in my chair and and be in like you know because my desk and all this stuff is like i teach my music lessons and i do my youtube videos and all this is my work spot so it's like yeah i play some games here but like if i really just want to chill out this is the way i generally do it this or like my playstation or switch that i hooked up with my tv but if i really am just like feeling lazy i just grab the steam deck because it plays enough stuff that i can i can get I can get a good gaming session to relax out of it.
And I love to see this because with this kind of tech, like you're, you're able to just get more games in, right? That's a big advantage of handheld. So let me know, do you have Xbox game pass ultimate? And have you ever used a cloud? And if not, are you interested in trying this?
I would absolutely recommend anyone and everyone who's got game pass and a steam deck. Just buy this app. It's seven bucks.
Support that developer because they're doing stuff that like Microsoft isn't doing this. Right. Microsoft isn't doing it. Steam isn't doing it.
So this developer just did what they're not doing. Right. And I understand why Steam doesn't want Microsoft taking money of game sales out of their pocket.
Right. So you get that. But like I said, let me know in the comments because I would absolutely love to know what you guys think about this.
This is a really impressive solution. And I could definitely see. let's say you go on like an airplane right and you've got like starlink or you pay for the the wi-fi like and you can get this you could be on a pretty long flight and then be playing starfield if you want it or be playing roller drone or you know uh hellblade 2 when it comes out right any of those things no man's sky that's on here right but any of those things just now by buying a really simple seven dollar app that takes you like three to five minutes to set up And it performs fantastically. Like I said, I'm going to have to see really how this performs. Maybe I'll give you guys an update on it later.
But I'm going to have to see how this performs with this. Because I've been loving this so far. So anyway, let me know down in the comments what you think.
Again, I'm Bobby here. And if you enjoyed this video, please subscribe. Leave a like.
That helps the channel out. And if you didn't, leave a dislike and let me know what I can do better in the future. Thank you so much for watching. XB Play. as a killer app and this has actually convinced me to keep my game pass subscription going indefinitely especially because i get it cheaper but i i can keep it now in good conscience like because now i i have this like veg solution to everything right so let me know what you think thank you guys so much for watching and i hope to see you soon