Microsoft Quietly Told Apple It Was Willing To Turn Big Xbox-exclusive Games Into iPhone Apps

Private emails show Microsoft wheeling and dealing to get into the App Store. From a report: Remember when Apple pretended like it would let cloud gaming services like Microsoft xCloud and Google Stadia into the App Store, while effectively tearing their business models to shreds? Know how Microsoft replied that forcing gamers to download hundreds of individual apps to play a catalog of cloud games would be a bad experience? In reality, Microsoft was willing to play along with many of Apple's demands -- and it even offered to bring triple-A, Xbox-exclusive games to iPhone to help sweeten the deal. That's according to a new set of private emails that The Verge unearthed in the aftermath of the Epic v. Apple trial.

These games would have run on Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) platform, streaming from remote server farms filled with Xbox One and Xbox Series X processors instead of relying on the local processing power of your phone. If the deal had been made, you could have theoretically bought a copy of a game like Halo Infinite in Apple's App Store itself and launched it like any other app -- instead of having to pay $14.99 a month for an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription with a set catalog of games and then needing to use Microsoft's web-based App Store workaround. But primarily, Microsoft was negotiating to bring its Netflix-esque catalog of xCloud games to the App Store, at a time when Apple had gotten very touchy about cloud gaming in general.

The emails, between Microsoft Xbox head of business development Lori Wright and several key members of Apple's App Store teams, show that Microsoft did start with a wide array of concerns about stuffing an entire service worth of Xbox games into individual App Store apps as of February 2020. Wright mentioned the "Complexity & management of creating hundreds to thousands of apps," how they'd have to update every one of those apps to fix any bugs, and how all those app icons could lead to cluttered iOS homescreens, among other worries.

The way this is supposed to work..

[RightSaidFred99]

Is eventually Apple people have to keep putting up with this shit and it drives people away from the platform. Then Apple will be forced to change their ways. But they seem to have some weird cult-like power that retards this natural process so who knows.

Re:

[b1ffster]

Maybe, just maybe, most people now don't have landlines, they have mobile/cell phones, and maybe, just maybe, nobody has a dialup modem anymore, or a CRT monitor. Maybe you are in the minority.

I don't understand

[Dan East]

Microsoft replied that forcing gamers to download hundreds of individual ... games would be a bad experience?

Isn't this how Xbox works? And Playstation, and Switch? Is Microsoft really dissing the income model of their Xbox cash cow? Are they showing messages on Xbox when users go to download a new game "We're sorry we're forcing you to have such a bad experience. Maybe you shouldn't buy this game and download it after all."

I just find it hilarious when these billion dollar companies find some absolutely hypocritical method of dissing each other.

Re:

[im_thatoneguy]

Well Microsoft is pushing more people to not download and install but instead just stream their games. So yes they are dissing the existing download and update model. It would be like Netflix saying that mailing a DVD is inefficient and cumbersome to customers. It's true that Netflix built their business mailing DVDs, but it's also true that Netflix wants you to install a single app and only stream the content that you need when you need it.

Imagine a separate Netflix app and icon for each movie in their

Remember when

[fermion]

MS tried to destroy the internet by building IE so it would generate only MS generated content amd would break every other browser. Or when MS was only built so it run on MS Windows, and file formats on MacOS were incompatible. Or when it tried to leverage the desktop to phone and music player, both which left users with worthless hardware and content, filling the landfills with dozens of useless devices. Apple devices are not primarily toys. MS positions itself as a leader by being a toy, and by being cheap devices for the worker bees. If you want games, buy a console. Most stuff on mobile devices are not console quality.

And if somehow the point of the article is that the most savvy and powerful tech company in the world cannot develop a technical solution to defeating Apple, that is just pitiful.

Re:

[AnonCowardSince1997]

I ‘member.