Microsoft Starts Testing Mouse and Keyboard Input for Xbox Cloud Gaming

Microsoft is inviting Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members to test mouse and keyboard input when playing games on Xbox Cloud Gaming. As of today, support is only available on Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and the Xbox app on Windows PCs, and only 14 cloud-enabled games are currently compatible.

Microsoft added support for mouse and keyboard input on the Xbox OS back in November 2018, but it’s still up to developers to implement it in their games. It probably makes more sense for strategy games like Age of Empires IV, but there are also a couple of high-profile shooters like Fortnite, Halo Infinite, or Cyberpunk 2077 that added mouse and keyboard support on Xbox consoles.

Anyway, the majority of games shipping on Xbox today don’t support mouse and keyboard input, so the selection of supported games in the Xbox Cloud Gaming library will be quite limited. You can find the full list below with their related known issues:

• Fortnite (browsers only)
• ARK Survival Evolved
• Sea of Thieves
• Grounded
• Halo Infinite
• Atomic Heart (Known issue: There is some difficulty switching between gamepad (controller) and Mouse and Keyboard while streaming)
• Sniper Elite 5
• Deep Rock Galactic
• High on Life
• Zombie Army 4 Dead War
• Gears Tactics
• Pentiment
• Doom 64
• Age of Empires 2

The Xbox Insider team also highlighted today that some cloud-enabled games will still display controller UI elements on startup, but they should disappear once the mouse and keyboard are properly recognized. When using Xbox Cloud Gaming on a web browser, mouse and keyboard input also only works when the stream is in full-screen mode, and testers will also need to click on the game stream to have the game detect mouse input.

Xbox Cloud Gaming is still officially in “beta” today, even though it’s been available with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate since November 2019. According to a recent report from Eurogamer, Microsoft also recently (and quietly) decreased the quality of cloud-enabled games by streaming the Series S version instead of the Series X version. As the report explained, this was likely done to allow more players to play at once from the same servers powered by Series X hardware.