Backbone One iPhone controller gets partnership with Xbox Game Pass at xCloud’s iOS launch today – TechCrunch

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Backbone One, the killer iPhone game pad I featured here late last year, just marked the mother of all ties for a gaming accessory. It comes bundled with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate as it launches on iOS today alongside the xCloud game streaming service.

As part of the deal, Backbone comes bundled with Xbox Game Pass in a new retail box that gets the Designed for Xbox stamp, making a Backbone + iPhone combo the closest we’ve ever seen to a portable Xbox. .

In my last piece I noticed how Backbone has cleverly used the accessory APIs built into iOS to deliver super slick functionality for its cross-game dashboard. It’s updating that dashboard to get better at showing you games, exposing you to new games, and letting you use its cropping features to share killer games with your friends. It’s one of the best gaming apps I’ve seen on iOS in years and has great potential to create an inter-university place to play for the largest gaming audience in the world.

The Capture button on Backbone One works with Xbox Cloud Gaming and lets you share it as a link. There’s also a new Xbox Game Pass feed and a way to switch between Xbox and iOS games in the same interface. There’s also a big call for Xbox Remote Play, a feature that’s still super underused and actually pretty good on the latest generation consoles.

And the package also uses an AppClip to display an AR version of Backbone running xCloud for people who are on the retail box in a store.

The Backbone team continues to amaze with its smart and clever integrations and solid instinct. The team’s game controller pedigree shows (some original Xbox 360 controller team members worked on Backbone), but the software aspects are the most impressive. The way Backbone unifies gaming experiences across AAA iOS ports like Warzone or Minecraft, Xbox and Playstation Remote Play and now native xCloud games seems like the way of the future for mobile gaming in a way that none of the individual players, including Apple , he managed to be right.

Even though xCloud games are web-based, they are treated and presented as native apps within Backbones’ really well done dashboard. I’ve personally played a lot of Destiny 2 on Stadia on Backbone and it’s great, can’t wait for it to be integrated more directly into the dashboard with cutout and social as Xbox cloud titles are today.

The experience of discovering, downloading and playing a game is better with a Backbone installed than even Apple Arcade, now that the team is taking more care. They also have a really clever linking mechanism that allows you to download apps directly from the App Store if you see a clip of them shared on your feed. This is how native Internet gamers want to find and play new games – a world of games and continually hypertext streams that make it possible to see, follow and play without having to stop to manually search for anything.

It also makes me long for a time when discovering games goes beyond downloading them and in a world where I can see a clip shared by a friend, touch it, and play a single level or game that I’m passionate about before having to go and buy the game. It would be a killer takeover on the ramp for new players.

Microsoft’s bond means that anyone who buys the Backbone for $ 99 from its website or Microsoft Store today gets 3 months of Game Pass Ultimate, making this the absolute best deal for new customers considering the GPU is $. 45 alone. This is bound to be a huge boost for Backbone as a young gaming startup.

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