Xbox Consoles Receive Browser That Can Play Stadia Games

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An upcoming new web browser on Xbox consoles called Microsoft Edge Chromium can stream and play games from services like Google Stadia and Amazon Luna. Xbox has been on a mission over the last few years to make playing video games as easy and consumer-friendly as possible. This mission truly began with the installation of Phil Spencer as the head of Xbox in 2014. Spencer manned the ship to help turn Xbox’s reputation around by putting the focus on video games and gamers after the Xbox One’s troubled start in 2013. Since then, a number of services and features have been put in place to improve the quality of life for Xbox owners (and in some cases for players on all platforms) and make games easier to play.

This initiative can be traced back to Microsoft’s 2015 E3 conference where Spencer announced that the Xbox team had been working on backward compatibility for the Xbox One, starting with Xbox 360 games and later adding original Xbox games in 2017. The golden goose of the Xbox experience, Xbox Game Pass, was announced and released in 2017, letting players access over 100 games with a Netflix-like subscription. Later, Microsoft’s game streaming experiment, Project xCloud, was added as a feature to Game Pass. The Xbox Adaptive Controller was announced in 2018 in an effort to make video games more accessible to people with disabilities. Phil Spencer and the Xbox team have also been strong advocates for cross-play between the different consoles and PC and can be credited, in part, for the implementation of this feature in games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Call of Duty: Warzone.

A report from The Verge (via IGN) said that Xbox’s new Microsoft Edge Chromium-powered browser is able to stream games from services like Google Stadia and Amazon Luna. The web browser is accessible to those playtesting in Xbox’s Alpha Skip-Ahead program: an invite-only “ring” of the Xbox Insider Program that lets players test new Xbox operating systems and features. So far, the browser does not have full mouse and keyboard support and is experiencing some bugs, but it is improving.

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The browser’s ability to access competitor services to Xbox Game Pass has not been confirmed as part of an accessibility initiative nor do we know if this was an intentional move by the Xbox team. It’s possible that the browser could also support Xbox Cloud Gaming even though there isn’t really any need for it. The browser also improves compatibility with web-based services like Skype and Discord.

Whether intentional or not, this is an interesting inclusion to Xbox’s future web browser. Microsoft has been advocating for the ability to access video games in as many ways as possible, even if that means playing Xbox games like Cuphead and the two Ori games on other platforms. This is not the final version of the browser, so there is the possibility of this feature being removed from Xbox before it is released.