Microsoft Cloud Gaming is about to get mouse and keyboard support

Cloud gaming is taking off over the past year, and with it, support for many different peripherals, games, and audiences. As a PlayStation fanboy, I never once thought I would be writing about Xbox, and certainly not as much as I have over the past year. The company is doing an incredible job with Game Pass, and now, its xCloud Cloud Gaming service – now called Xbox Cloud Gaming – is set to add mouse and keyboard support.

As revealed by the head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Jorg Neumann, in a Windows Central Q&A session, platform-level integration for your mouse and keyboard is being worked on for a selection of games, and while Flight Simulator works with “MKB” on consoles and PC, the cloud gaming experience will soon have feature parity. At this time, you’re stuck with a gamepad, which isn’t at all ideal for simulation games of this level!

“The next step for us is mouse [and] keyboard,” stated Neumann in a recent community Q&A. “This is platform-level support, so it has nothing to do with us. Obviously, mouse and keyboard works for our sim. So the platform team is working on this. I know I can’t give a date because it’s the platform team. I don’t know their dates, but it’s coming.”

Windows Central

So far, Neumann hasn’t stated when exactly this new feature would arrive, but so far, no one at Microsoft has spoken at all about mouse and keyboard for cloud gaming, so this interview was telling. Having it from the get-go on the game would make it easier to fire it up on a computer where you already have these peripherals available and plugged in. Let me know in the comments if you feel you would play Microsoft Flight Simulator this way, or if you’d just play traditionally.