Another week, another episode of DF Direct and Microsoft’s latest endeavours are our lead topics of discussion. Last week, the Xbox app for the Amazon Fire Stick 4K was released, backed by aggressive marketing from Microsoft suggesting that you don’t need an Xbox to play Xbox. On a broad level, the message is accurate but based on the quality of service, things need to change significantly before we can endorse that idea, whether you’re experiencing Xbox on PC or via the cloud.
I bought an Amazon Fire Stick 4K Max to test Xbox streaming last week, but fully expected the experience to mirror the current cloud streaming offering available via an Xbox console or PC. After all, the quality of the streaming isn’t really defined by your client hardware but rather whatever data is streamed at you by Microsoft’s servers. The difference offered by the Fire Stick is, of course, accessibility. Similar to its endeavours in getting cloud streaming working on Samsung TVs, this is all about opening up Xbox to more potential users who may not be particularly interested in buying a console. The idea is sound, but I feel the execution needs work.
Even though you need one of the 4K versions of the latest Fire Stick to stream Xbox, it’s the same 1080p stream we’ve seen previously in our prior tests. Microsoft deserves some kudos for input lag response that beats its PlayStation counterpart. It’s still noticeably slower than the local experience, but you can adjust to it. Mostly, it’s fine, especially if you choose a game that runs at 60 frames per second. Microsoft also deserves kudos for an interface that works and a clear suggestion from the app to switch your TV into Game Mode (mine defaulted to ‘Film Maker’ mode on an LG CX OLED – good for media content, not good for gaming).
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