The key time that people are playing is interestingly between eight and ten at night. Gluckstein adds: "The UK south data centre has been our busiest data centre of all the markets that we're serving.
We had to go in and update some of our anti-cheat detection." It was never before realistic for a client to have a 0ms ping time. And the algorithms we've made to detect cheating over the years see that as something that shouldn't happen. It turns out that because you're playing on a console that's housed in a data centre, its ping time to the server is incredibly low - sometimes 0ms. "My favourite one was when we launched in our preview, we started noticing that some of our Xbox Live anti-cheat detection was triggering. "We've learnt a lot of things on the tech side," reveals Kareem Choudhry, corporate vice president of Gaming Cloud at Microsoft. It's a huge gaming market but not one we've played in before" "There are more people who play games in India than the population of the US - about 300 million. But one month in, what has the xCloud team discovered already? There are lots of things still to work out in terms of games, territories, pricing and interest. Do they play for different lengths of time? Do they want to play different types of games?"
With the games, what we've tried to choose - because this is a really interesting paradigm with cloud gaming - is a broad variety of games to understand the gameplay changes when people stream content. "We're working with a tonne of partners to bring Project xCloud to every device. It's a really interesting place for us to go and learn. It's a huge gaming market, but not one we've played in before. With India today, there are more people who play games in India than the population of the US - about 300 million. It's interesting to see how we play within that.
Japan is a very big console gaming market, but not traditionally a big market for Xbox. We're taking Preview to Canada, to Western Europe, to Japan and to India. We started with four first-party games, and now we have 50 games playable in Preview and we're going to be inviting many more people to join us.
We're partnering there with SK Telecom to really look at the possibilities of 5G and also the potential of a market which isn't a traditional console market but a very big PC gaming market. And then South Korea is a market leader in telcos. The US and UK are obviously mature Xbox markets, but we wanted to look at what it took to extend gameplay. We kicked off Preview in three countries for very particular reasons.
"We have Reddit threads open with our community. "It's really important to us that we're very open about what we're doing every step of the way," says general manager of Project xCloud Catherine Gluckstein. Xbox launched its streaming service in the UK, US and South Korea just over a month ago in a 'Preview' state, featuring just four games. Yet streaming has been signed off, and some of the biggest companies in games are racing to find the answers to those questions. Surely you know who the audience is? *shrugs*. What's the business model? We're still working that out. How much money will it make? Not entirely sure. I can only imagine the answers to the chief financial officer's questions. I feel for the manager who had to get the budget for xCloud signed off.