Xbox’s New TCL Partnership Couldn’t Come At A Worse Time

Xbox has announced a new partnership with TCL, which will see the Xbox app added to “select” models from the brand. This means that owners of those TCL TVs won’t need to spend $500 on an Xbox Series S or $800 on an Xbox Series X, as they can instead take advantage of the cloud-based gaming features offered as part of a monthly Xbox Game Pass subscription–but only for a few hours per month, before they need to start coughing up some extra cash to buy more hours to play.

If your TCL TV is supported, all you’ll need is a Game Pass subscription and an Xbox controller to start playing. Xbox Game Pass also offers a library of games to play, so you’ll be good to go once you’re signed up and logged in. As a reminder, you’ll only get a few hours of cloud streaming depending on which tier of Game Pass you sign up for. The cheapest option, Game Pass Essential, will give you five hours of cloud streaming; Game Pass Premium doubles that number to 10 hours, and Game Pass Ultimate caps out at 15 hours. Pricing for top-up cloud streaming packages has not yet been announced.

This announcement also comes during a busy time for Xbox, as its next big first-party game is Gears of War: E-Day. It arrives after a busy year for the gaming brand, which saw 75 day-one releases through its subscription program. More Game Pass titles are also on the way in September, with Speedrunners 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War headlining the first wave of new arrivals.

TCL TVs are typically positioned as budget-to-mid-range sets, which could potentially give Xbox exposure to millions of consumers who wouldn’t normally buy one of their expensive consoles. The Azure servers that Xbox uses for streaming games belong to its parent company, Microsoft, and these have started to turn a tidy profit for the company. Microsoft recently reported $29.4 billion in Azure server sales for the last quarter, but Amazon Web Services still eclipses those numbers with $42.2 billion in quarterly revenue.