Microsoft will indeed follow through on its plan to open its xCloud game streaming service to the public later this year. According to Mark Skwarski, a senior product marketing manager at Xbox, xCloud is currently in the hands of Microsoft employees around the world.

“We are scaling the program up globally. We have deployed project xCloud blades into data centers in 13 regions around the world. We’ve also started our alpha testing,” Skwarski told a group of reporters at an E3 briefing this morning. “Many employees like myself have access to Project xCloud.” Skwarski added that starting later this year, the public will be able to get its hands on the service as well.

Microsoft was suspiciously quiet about xCloud at its E3 press conference

That information clears up some confusion Microsoft created during its E3 press conference in Los Angeles. Onstage yesterday, Xbox chief Phil Spencer announced a new console streaming feature for Xbox owners that’s basically similar to Sony’s existing Remote Play for the PlayStation 4, meaning you’ll be able to turn your Xbox at home into a streaming device so you can play any Xbox game from a mobile phone or tablet. But it’s not full-blown cloud gaming in the way xCloud is designed to be, which instead is much more like Google Stadia and supposed to let you play any game on any screen.

Spencer also seemed to imply that xCloud’s future was closely tied to the upcoming Project Scarlett console, the next-generation Xbox slated for 2020, leading to some confusion about whether owning Scarlett would be necessary to access xCloud’s eventual consumer offering.

Spencer set an October time frame for the release of Xbox streaming mode, but it wasn’t immediately clear that that also would be the time frame for the public test of xCloud. The company originally committed to public xCloud trials when it announced the service in October 2018 and it repeated that commitment in a video demo back in March, before Google’s Stadia reveal.

Spencer also didn’t mention anything about streaming to TVs, browsers, or PCs, as Stadia does thanks to Chrome and Chromecast. That led some, like The Verge’s Tom Warren, to appropriately speculate that Microsoft purposefully kept its xCloud talk during its E3 showing to a minimum because it feels the service is not ready to compete with Google Stadia.

Now, Microsoft has since clarified to The Verge that these two technologies, Xbox game streaming and xCloud, are in fact separate things, although they both run in Azure data centers. But when Spencer mentioned an October release date for Xbox’s streaming feature and said it would include the ability to stream both from a console you own and one housed in an Azure data center, the latter scenario refers to xCloud. “Whether you’re using a console in our datacenter, or your console at home this October you’ll be able to use our hybrid gaming cloud to play your games wherever you go,” is Spencer’s full quote. Microsoft won’t yet say if these two options will be accessible from the same piece of software, for instance like a mobile app, or if xCloud’s public test will be distributed through a separate piece of software.

While we don’t know Microsoft’s internal thinking here, it does seem like xCloud is not as ambitious in its current form as it was when it was first announced, when Microsoft’s cloud gaming chief Kareem Choudhry promised the service would work on consoles and PCs in addition to mobile devices. During the E3 briefing, Skwarski said that Microsoft is right now only focusing on mobile devices, so smartphones and tablets only.

That doesn’t mean xCloud won’t one day get to the level of ambition that Google has with Stadia. But Google has come out of the gate in the cloud gaming race with a rather impressive service that works across TVs, browsers, and mobile devices, and it’s capable of pushing 4K at 60 fps thanks to its 10.7 teraflops per user of processing power. Google has also outlined pricing for its service, given it a commercial release date for this November, and announced that it will let game publishers build or offer their own subscriptions on top of Stadia.

Related Microsoft is suspiciously silent about xCloud game streaming

Microsoft may have been caught flat-footed by Google’s aggressive willingness to get into the cloud gaming space, and that’s why it doesn’t have more to say about xCloud at this year’s E3. But that said, it’s reassuring to know that, starting in October, xCloud will be made available to the public.

That way, we’ll be able to properly compare it to Stadia. Because regardless of what devices are supported, what games are available, or how much cloud gaming services like these will cost, the technology won’t get off the ground if the latency is unmanageable or the services just plain don’t work well at launch. Hopefully, by this fall, both Google and Microsoft are in a position to bring these services to consumers’ living rooms.

Update June 10th, 4:05PM ET: An earlier version of this story said Xbox chief Phil Spencer did not announce a time frame for the public test of xCloud during yesterday’s E3 press conference. According to Microsoft, news of xCloud’s public availability was grouped together with Xbox’s new streaming feature. This article has been updated to reflect the distinction between the two technologies and to note that Spencer’s October time frame announcement also referred to xCloud.