Microsoft Secretly Informed Apple That It Was Ready To Transform Large Xbox-exclusive Games Into Iphone Apps
Microsoft's wheeling and negotiating to get into the App Store is revealed in private emails.
Remember how Apple promised to enable cloud gaming providers like Microsoft xCloud and Google Stadia into the App Store while ripping their business models apart? Do you recall how Microsoft responded that asking gamers to download hundreds of separate programmes in order to enjoy a catalogue of cloud games would be a horrible experience?
Instead of relying on your phone’s local processing capacity, these games would have ran on Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) infrastructure, streaming from remote server farms populated with Xbox One and Xbox Series X processors. Instead of paying $14.99 a month for an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription with a set catalogue of games and then having to use Microsoft’s web-based App Store workaround, you could have theoretically bought a copy of Halo Infinite in Apple’s App Store and launched it like any other app if the deal had been made.
But, more importantly, Microsoft was negotiating to bring its Netflix-like xCloud game catalogue to the App Store, at a time when Apple was wary of cloud gaming in general.
The emails show that Microsoft had a variety of reservations about squeezing an entire service’s worth of Xbox games into individual App Store apps as of February 2020, according to Microsoft Xbox chief of business development Lori Wright and several senior members of Apple’s App Store teams. Among other concerns, Wright noted the “complexity and management of generating hundreds to thousands of apps,” how they’d have to update each one to solve any flaws, and how all those app icons could lead to cluttered iOS homescreens.
“We feel that the difficulties detailed here will cause users to be frustrated and confused, resulting in a sub-par experience on Apple devices compared to all other platforms,” she said.
However, by March of last year, Microsoft was proposing that it could really construct those hundreds or thousands of separate apps to submit to the App Store — as long as it could make them more like shortcuts rather than cramming the entire cloud gaming streaming stack into each one. She argued that this was comparable to how watchOS apps operated previously.
“If we have only one streaming technology app, it will be around 150 MB in size, but the other apps will be around 30 MB in size and will not need to be updated when the streaming technology is updated.” Users will have a better experience as a result of this,” Wright stated.
Wright also dismissed the idea of bringing exclusive triple-A Xbox titles to iOS, claiming that they, too, would require “the streaming tech bundle as a separate app to offer the correct experience.”
“Having access to these exclusive AAA titles in addition to the Game Pass games would be a really exciting possibility for iOS customers,” she said.
Clearly, none of this occurred. In September 2020, Microsoft rejected Apple’s new App Store standards, and a month later, the web workaround version of xCloud was launched. It arrived in April of this year.
Where did the talks come to a halt? Apple was the one who rejected Microsoft’s proposals, according to The Verge, because Apple insisted on forcing every game to have the whole streaming stack and wouldn’t agree to anything else.
“We designed our concept for bringing games to individual apps to conform with App Store standards. As stated in the initial email, Apple declined it based on our desire for a single streaming tech app to support the individual game apps. Forcing each game to use our streaming tech stack proved unfeasible from a support and engineering standpoint, and would result in an immensely bad customer experience,” says Xbox Cloud Gaming CVP Kareem Choudhry in a statement to The Verge.
