Microsoft’s Xbox Live to go cross-platform with Android, iOS support

Microsoft says Xbox Live is set to get much bigger as it expands from 400 million gaming devices to 2 billion devices.

Xbox Live players can soon share their achievements with more friends (Microsoft)

Microsoft will soon bring Xbox Live support to games on mobile platforms such as iOS, Nintendo Switch and Android. The company will formally introduce the new tool at the 2019 Game Developers Conference (GDC) which kicks off on March 18.

Microsoft already offered Xbox Live support to some of its games across mobile devices. The company is now going to make the feature available to more titles in a bid to make the Xbox Live fully cross-platform.

To get things started, Microsoft will soon release a SDK to facilitate the game developers build Xbox Live tools for mobile platforms.

"Xbox Live is one of the largest, most engaged gaming communities on the planet with decades of experience providing managed game services to developers that save you time and unlock all of the social and engagement features that players love," said Microsoft on its GDC conference schedule page.

"Now Xbox Live is about to get MUCH bigger. Xbox Live is expanding from 400M gaming devices and a reach to over 68M active players to over 2B devices with the release of our new cross-platform XDK."

"Xbox Live players are highly engaged and active on Xbox and PC, but now they can take their gaming achievement history, their friends list, their clubs, and more with them to almost every screen," it added.

Microsoft hopes the new SDK will enable developers to make their users mingle more freely across platforms. Developers will also be able to leverage PlayFab gaming services (backend platform for live games) for easier integration of the new Xbox Live SDK.

Microsoft's new SDK is in line with the company's efforts to build cross-platform gaming services. The company recently launched Project xCloud which is said to allow users stream graphic-intensive games on their mobile devices. Public trials of Project xCloud are scheduled to begin later this year. While the streaming platform leverages 5G network, it will be also be optimised for 4G.

"Currently, the test experience is running at 10 megabits per second. Our goal is to deliver high-quality experiences at the lowest possible bitrate that work across the widest possible networks, taking into consideration the uniqueness of every device and network," Microsoft had said.