Xfinity Games beta: Surprise, Comcast and EA can’t solve streaming games services

Online game streaming services are beginning to pop up all over the place, and they each promise a future in which you can kick your game system and discs to the curb. Just subscribe to their services, they insist, and you'll have instant, anywhere-you-want access to new games running on high-end computers.

As people who've tested the likes of Nvidia Grid, PlayStation Now, and GameFly Streaming can attest to, these services work to some extent—with their fair share of caveats. In particular, the server-to-user structure introduces lag and button-press delays—twitchy-gaming kryptonite, basically—and their game rosters tend to dig back a few years as opposed to being loaded with the coolest new titles.

The game-streaming crowd grew one bigger last Tuesday thanks to an entry from a company we never expected to join the fray: Comcast. They didn't offer some sort of far-off tease, either. Within hours of an announcement, the cable and Internet company's Xfinity Games service debuted, albeit in beta form, for an invite-only slew of its X1 TV customers.

We chortled at Comcast of all companies making a big gaming move, but then we thought about it. Comcast's position as a media titan just might have put it in position to be a bigger game-streaming contender than we'd realized.

This was the first ISP we'd seen announce a Netflix-like gaming service, after all. If that content was delivered as a managed service, like cable, then it might have better performance than most Internet services. Comcast even had a pretty decent partner in EA, a company whose major sports franchises hadn't appeared on any other streaming rivals.

Full of curiosity, we set out to see just what Comcast had pulled off. We didn't need long after that to reach a verdict. Xfinity Games isn't just "beta" bad; it could go down as one of the most confusing, unfocused gaming launches we've ever seen.

Hello, HTML5...

What does it take to play with Xfinity Games? Assuming you either have a beta invite or stumble upon this article after the service's eventual full-scale launch, you'll need to subscribe to a Comcast television package that includes one of the company's X1 cable boxes. The beta is currently free; Comcast reps hinted at an eventual monthly charge for the service, but that cost remains unconfirmed.

Comcast told us we'd only need to pay for the Limited Basic channel plan to get an X1 box and try out the free Xfinity Games beta, so we ordered an installation. Unfortunately, our X1 technician tried to convince us that we had to subscribe to nothing short of the more expensive Digital Starter plan to use one of the Xfinity Games-compatible DVR boxes, but we managed to get everything up and running on the cheaper plan much to his surprise. Our technician also confessed to having never heard of Xfinity Games before meeting us; to be fair, the app's beta had been publicly unveiled only one day prior. He made sure to point out that he and his family were X1 TV beta testers for months before its public launch.

This technician didn't have any gaming controllers for us, nor did he point out any USB plugs we might use to attach our own controllers. Xfinity Games has a steeper controller requirement. After having our Xfinity account greenlit for the beta, we loaded the X1 app, at which point we were told by our TV to sync a phone or tablet, connected to our home's Xfinity Internet connection, to our box. The approved list during the beta included most iPad models and many Samsung phones and tablets but no other brands' devices.

This limitation wasn't due to any app installation. Instead, the Xfinity Games app asks users to load a website and enter an authentication code, at which point the service's HTML5 interface pops up on a Web browser. We're not sure why Comcast has posted such a narrow "compatible" device list, but our attempts to run Xfinity Games’ companion HTML5 interface on an LG Nexus 6 resulted in more crashes and errors than on an iPad Air 1, so we stuck with their rules. (Users are also required to sync up a current or new EA Origin account.)

To load a game, players must navigate Xfinity Games’ Web interface, which currently consists of five "genres"—Family, Sports, Indie, Retro, and PopCap. (Yes, one of EA's subsidiaries is a genre all its own.) All of the games are published by EA, and the selection is... odd.

Echoes of the Wii U

Right now, Xfinity Games players have unlimited, free access to 23 games, almost all of which have launched on mobile platforms in one way or another. While they all look like high-end Android versions or Xbox 360 versions, both EA and Comcast reps told Ars that these games were all "designed specifically for the platform."

Games are quite quick to load, and gameplay appears exclusively on the TV screen. In other words, the mobile device's screen is dedicated to controls, and you'll see no live information or animation that corresponds with the game in question there. Only one game, PGA Tour, offers an elaborate touch-screen; the rest are incredibly simple interfaces that either offer virtual controller buttons or employ a mouse emulator.

Only PGA Tour really shines due to this system. Its touchscreen interface fills your device's entire screen with a swing meter that you can run your finger on, Golden Tee-style, to rear back and swing away. It also includes touch interfaces for direction, backspin placement, club selection, and camera adjustment. Quite frankly, it's the kind of interface you'd hope for in a Wii U golf game.

Sadly, this welcome, easy-to-use interface has been wasted on a very, very pedestrian game of golf. The coldly named PGA Tour—no celebrity name, no year—only offers one golf course, Dubai's The Els Club. [Update: PGA Tour includes eight courses—a mix of real-life and fantasy locations—which are separated in the HTML5 menu as "episodes" that appear where help text generally shows up before loading a game. None of the game's help menus explain how to load separate golf courses, so we'll chalk this up to a beta GUI issue that will hopefully be resolved to make discovering more in-game content easier. None of the other games in the current beta include such "episode" options.)

The course has been rendered with the bare minimum of geometry and foliage (not to mention, there are zero people in the crowd). There's no progression, no stats, no bonus modes, barely even any decent audio. You can play a course either solo or in a pass-and-play multiplayer match, and you can save and resume progress between sessions. That's it. (If you pick around the menus carefully enough, you can change your in-game golfer to wacky stuff like a monkey, a guy in a space suit, and a guy in a giant turkey costume.)

This, by the way, appears to be a completely different golf game than any we've seen from EA Sports before, meaning it doesn't use course assets from the Xbox 360 version of older Tiger Woods games, nor does it resemble the company's sillier King of the Course golf game on iOS. The interface seems very carefully thought out, while the rest of the game seems like the most corner-cutting project EA Sports has put out in years. It's an odd mix, yet it's the best game you're gonna find on Xfinity Games.

Pressing our buttons (er, button)

In terms of "active" games that test the service's latency, you have three options: FIFA '13 (yes, the two-year-old version), NBA Jam: On Fire Edition (which, strangely, has super-fresh roster updates not even found in the game's Android version), and Real Racing 2 (a version that no longer exists on mobile storefronts).

Those two sports games already have mobile versions, and their iOS and Android incarnations include virtual buttons that replicate nearly every command on consoles. For NBA Jam, that means three buttons (shoot, pass, and turbo), and for FIFA, that means even more buttons. That's a tough squish, considering that virtual buttons get in the way of the on-screen action. We say all this because even though we'd prefer hard controllers, we were hopeful the Xfinity Games versions would at least feel better than squished, everything-on-the-same-screen mobile versions.

Here's the weird thing: both games' Xfinity versions reduce the number of buttons you can use. They both become one-button games, and they add swipes and gestures to your taps to simulate other actions. In NBA Jam, that means tapping to pass, holding your finger down for turbo, or holding your finger down and then swiping up to shoot. Other directional swipes must be used for head fakes and spins. FIFA offers even fewer moves: tap to pass, swipe to shoot, and that's it. No fakes, no lobs, no dribble tricks (and forget about precision shooting or passing).

This seemed like a weird reduction. Again, Xfinity Games had an entire blank tablet screen that could've been smothered in virtual buttons. We suppose that design might have been avoided because tablet-holders would be looking up at a TV screen while losing track of where their fingers were. But ether way, the current minimalistic design decision was made all the more frustrating by the half-second latency introduced by the X1 cable box.

If Comcast is controlling the pipeline for its games service (which avoids the Wi-Fi issues of other streaming services thanks to the X1's direct wall plug), it's doing a lousy job so far during the beta. We're already losing precision thanks to these inexact controls where moves don't trigger until our gesture has finished. Now we have a whole half-second delay—the worst delay of any modern game-streaming service we've tested, if only by a hair or two—to account for, as well? Thanks but no thanks.

Not that there was much to do in either game, anyway. Both titles only include exhibition modes, meaning they've been stripped of the season, practice, and management options from their mobile incarnations. Even worse, neither game has an options menu, meaning players cannot toggle simple things like match length or difficulty. Unless you face off against another friend—who can easily attach a mobile device to your X1 box—you're stuck playing against the dumbest grunts who've ever grunted.

Worse, the games looked like high-end Android games with frequent framerate chugs. So while the games looked serviceable enough, Xfinity Games is still at the bottom of the game-streaming barrel. Same goes for Real Racing 2, which appeared to be an exact Android port that exemplified the streaming rig's awful, half-second lag issues. You control the game just like the mobile version, meaning you hold the tablet up like a steering wheel and turn it to steer in the game. With so many sharp, sudden turns, the lag feels drastic and inexcusable.

Why we'd use a perfectly useful iPad to stream an outdated version of Real Racing and suffer from that version's lag and splotchy, streamed visuals—with giant, pixellated chunks of fuzzy color—is beyond us. We could just download the mobile version directly to that iPad and be a lot less annoyed (and maybe pay a few bucks for an A/V cable to stream that action to our TV screen, should we be so inclined to share the action with our families).