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Xbox creates Instagram-like Stories, but for video games

Microsoft announced that Xbox fans will now be able to share their gaming moments in the form of Stories on the Xbox app for iOS and Android. The latest update came out on Tuesday, but it’s only available in Australia at the moment, with other regions expected to receive it soon. It’s basically the video game version of Instagram or Snapchat, which introduced the Stories format first.

To start creating stories, users can press the “+” button on their profile picture located in the Stories channel in the middle of the Xbox app’s home screen. From there, they can select any gameplay clip, screenshot, or achievement from the gallery to share with their friends, and then add a caption describing the moment they screengrabbed or the challenge they have accomplished. Once shared, the stories will be shown on the profile for 72 hours, which is triple what the limit is on Instagram and Snapchat.

Xbox App User Stories

When Snapchat was born in 2011, it gave birth to the social media trend of sharing photos and videos in a slideshow format for their friends to see for 24 hours — hence, Stories. Over the years, Stories became so popular, Instagram, its parent company Facebook (now Meta), and even YouTube adopted the format to add flavor to the platform that otherwise only allowed people to post photos and videos that would stay on their profile forever (unless, of course, they take them down or archive them for a variety of reasons). In 2020, Twitter put a spin on Stories and called it Fleets, but that feature only lasted eight months after mixed reactions from users.

Now that Stories has expanded to the gaming sphere, the feature on the Xbox app will be a boon for streamers to promote their content and their channels even further. If they can share gameplay footage and screenshots on their Instagram Stories, chances are they’ll share that content on the Xbox app’s Stories as well.

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Cristina Alexander
Cristina Alexander has been writing since 2014, from opining about pop culture on her personal blog in college to reporting…
The best upcoming Xbox Series X games: 2023 and beyond
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The Xbox Series X and Series S have now been out for over two years, bringing better resolution, higher frame rates, and ray tracing to gamers around the world. The upcoming Xbox Series X games on this list promise to continue to show off all those bells and whistles in fun, new experiences.

If you're eager to find out what Microsoft has in store for the years ahead, we've rounded up every game confirmed so far, including new offerings, franchise installments, and ports of existing titles. We're looking beyond the first-party projects here to encompass all the great games coming to this powerful piece of gaming hardware. Maybe some of them will end up being one of the best games on Xbox Series X.
Confirmed 2023 releases
The games listed below either have 100% confirmed release dates or solid release windows that we expect them to hit this year. Anything that's up in the air due to more vague launch predictions or previous delays will be listed under the following header.

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Typically, April isn't that exciting of a month for video games. Most publishers try to get their biggest games out before the end of the fiscal year in March, so April usually only has one or two notable releases alongside a ton of indies. April 2023 was different, though. Although it wasn't packed to the brim with notable new game releases, a lot of very notable franchises like Star Wars, Minecraft, League of Legends, and Tron had significant new game launches during April 2023.
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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Like in April 2022, this month's biggest release is an ambitious Star Wars game. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a sequel to 2019's excellent Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and expands on it in almost every way. The story feels more ambitious and personal at the same time, as all of the worlds players can explore as Cal are more densely packed with content than before, and combat has been refined to be even more fun thanks to new stances and perks players can use.
"Cal’s journey follows the thematic trends established by The Empire Strikes Back and The Last Jedi, but is willing to get even more personal with them in a way only a game can," Digital Trends' Tomas Franzese wrote in a four-star review of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. "This, coupled with its deeper combat and more densely packed worlds, truly put me in the mindset of a Jedi during this dire era."
It's an entirely single-player Star Wars adventure, and a meaty one at that. This game can easily keep you entertained for 20 hours or more and tells the most engaging Star Wars narrative since Andor. This is one of the best Star Wars games ever made, so fans of the franchise shouldn't miss out on it. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is available now for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
Advance Wars: 1+2 Re-Boot Camp

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Why cloud gaming is the linchpin in Microsoft’s troubled Activision Blizzard acqusition
Key art showing multiple devices playing games via the cloud.

The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) delivered a shocker this week when it blocked Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard on Wednesday. While a lot of focus on Microsoft’s fight was centered around whether or not the acquisition would give Xbox consoles an unfair advantage over PlayStation consoles, what ultimately decided it was a much smaller market: cloud gaming.
The idea of being able to stream the game you’re playing from the cloud has existed for well over a decade. Cloud gaming’s relevance to the video game industry has only grown over the past several years thanks to both failed and successful efforts from big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and, most importantly, Microsoft. Still, cloud gaming is considered relatively niche, with Activision Blizzard Bobby Kotick calling it "inconsequential" in an interview with Bloomberg and UCL Associate Profession Joost Rietveld saying it’s not a distinct market in a submission to the CMA.
Despite those pleas, the CMA claims that cloud gaming is a “nascent market” and that “already strong incumbent in this market even stronger” in its 418-page report on the matter. Following the CMA’s decision on Wednesday, I spoke to several different analysts to find more clarity about how big Microsoft is in the cloud gaming space and why the CMA should feel compelled to intervene. While experts mostly side with Microsoft over the CMA on this decision, one greater truth emerged from these discussions. Whether one thinks cloud gaming is relevant to this acquisition or not, this emergent style of gaming has reached a point of no return where it'll be instrumental to the video game industry going forward. 
Microsoft, king of cloud gaming
Cloud gaming may sound like a niche within the industry, but that's not entirely accurate. BrandFinance Managing Director Laurence Newell tells Digital Trends that “cloud-based services account for over 70% of Microsoft’s brand value, amounting to a staggering $137.5 billion.” That’s quite an eye-catching number that understandably would raise a regulator's alarm bells. However, Newell admits that gaming only makes up 8.5% of Microsoft’s revenue, and cloud gaming is an even smaller amount of that slice.
Despite its relatively small impact on the wider company, most of the experts I spoke to agreed that Microsoft has emerged as a cloud gaming leader thanks to its compatibility with a large segment of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate library. Conversely, Activision Blizzard has had almost no cloud gaming presence outside of one Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice port on Google Stadia before that service’s shutdown. If it were to be acquired, it is inevitable that more Activision Blizzard games would likely come to cloud-based gaming services.

Despite the shutdown of Google Stadia and the relatively small brand value received from cloud gaming compared to the rest of the company, the CMA still points out in the press release about its decision that “monthly active users in the U.K. more than tripled from the start of 2021 to the end of 2022. It is forecast to be worth up to 11 billion British pounds globally and 1 billion pounds in the U.K. by 2026.” Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the UCL School of Management Joost Rietveld, who has also been a consultant for Microsoft during its acquisition process, challenges the notion that cloud gaming as a whole is a single market.
Instead, Rietveld splits it into four categories, placing Xbox Game Pass into a category called “cloud gaming as a feature,” which is when it’s “offered as part of a consumer-facing distribution platform” or “included within a bigger bundle of services provided by the platformer.” Under Rietveld’s view, services like Nvidia GeForce Now, Ubitius, and EE -- all of whom Microsoft has made individual deals to bring Activision Blizzard and Xbox Game Studios titles to -- fall into different categories and thus shouldn’t be considered or directly compared to Xbox Game Pass. No matter how they’re categorized now, the real question mark looming over the technology is its future growth, according to Omdia Senior Principal Games Analyst Steve Bailey.
“Will it remain a niche additional service or become the gaming platform of the future?” Bailey asks in his statement to Digital Trends. “Our projection is that cloud gaming is growing rapidly (revenue should more than double by 2026), but it’s still a long way from taking over the games market, so it remains arguable either way.”
“Arguable” stands out as the keyword to me here. Like any emergent technology, we’re heavily debating the positives and negatives of cloud gaming, specifically through the lens of this acquisition. But what exactly is it that the CMA sees in Microsoft that worries them?
The CMA’s problem with Microsoft
“The CMA’s argument is not that acquiring Activision Blizzard would allow Microsoft to dominate the console market as a whole, where Sony and Nintendo have strong positions relative to Xbox, but only that it would help it to achieve a dominant position in cloud gaming specifically,” Bailey tells Digital Trends. “Microsoft and Activision Blizzard will likely argue that this is disproportionate, given the relatively small scale of the cloud gaming market.”

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