GDC 2025: Optimizing Your Game for Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta)

Bringing your existing Xbox title to Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) often requires minimal effort—most console titles work seamlessly via cloud streaming without the need for any modifications on your end. However, to fully leverage the platform and reach a broader audience, there are some optimizations you should consider which can significantly enhance player experience and boost engagement. Let’s take a closer look at some of these optimizations that can help you and your team unlock the full potential of Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Maximize Your Reach with Input Flexibility

First, we highly recommend you explore other input options. While every game supports gamepads, not everyone has one. Players on desktop PCs are often more comfortable playing via mouse + keyboard. The good news is that Xbox consoles have supported mouse + keyboard for input for a while, and if you add it to your console game, it should work via Xbox Cloud Gaming as well.

For players on mobile, touch controls let your players have a more natural experience as they take your game with them wherever they go. Maybe they want to play a long session, or maybe just quickly check-in with their friends while they’re away – you can create custom touch controls that fit your game in a variety of ways.

In general, we see that games which support mouse + keyboard see a lot more play via cloud on desktops, and games that support touch controls tend to be the most popular cloud titles on mobile.

Touch Controls Made Easier

There are a couple of different ways to support touch controls in Xbox Cloud Gaming, including full native touch where players directly interact with the UI drawn by your game.

Minecraft Dungeons elegantly blends native touch controls with customized touch overlays, demonstrating how a thoughtful approach can enable a console game to reach mobile audiences.

But if you’d prefer to just create touch overlays, and minimize changes to your game’s code, we recently launched an extension to Visual Studio Code – the Touch Adaptation Kit Editor. In past GDC talks, we discussed the many options available to you to create unique and creative layouts which perfectly fit your game, and this extension makes it much easier to tweak and experiment with those layouts with real-time visual feedback.

That extension is available to developers right now, has many pre-defined templates to get you started, and has rich IntelliSense support for English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.

Explore Cloud Aware

In past GDC talks (most of which are available at Microsoft Game Dev on YouTube), we detailed other options you can explore to optimize your game for Xbox Cloud Gaming. You can also reach out to us via your account manager, or on Discord, if you’d like to learn more.

Some examples of how you can use the Cloud Aware GDK are:

• Instead of just having one touch control layout that stays the same, you can create multiple touch layouts which change depending on what’s happening in your game. For example, driving controls when you’re in a vehicle, and different layouts when you’re on foot or in a battle.

• You can opt to make your touch controls mostly disappear while in a cutscene, or if the player is in a menu that supports native touch.

• You can get information about the size and DPI density of the screen your game is being played on, to help you adjust the size of UI elements.

• You can render at any aspect ratio instead of just 16x9, to accommodate phones and tablets which could be wider or taller, or just fit into any size browser window on the desktop.

• You can enable your game to be aware of how much network latency the user is experiencing and compensate for that in-game.

• You can also choose to use cloud aware APIs to simply record in your analytics when you detect that your game is being played via cloud gaming, and discover your own insights.

By implementing these cloud aware optimizations, you can unlock the full potential of Xbox Cloud Gaming, enabling you to reach new audiences, enhance player satisfaction, and maximize your game's performance across every type of device.