Amazon’s latest Fire TVs just got a game-changing upgrade

While I mostly use my Fire TV Stick 4K Max for streaming, one underrated feature that’s recently impressed me is cloud gaming.

Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Select, 4K Plus, 4K Max, and Fire TV Cube all support cloud gaming via Amazon Luna or Xbox Game Pass, making it a straightforward way to play the latest games without owning an expensive gaming PC, Xbox Series X/S, or PS5. The catch? Until now, Xbox Cloud Gaming hasn’t been available on Amazon’s Fire TV smart TVs. That’s finally changing.

Just in time for the holidays, Amazon has announced that Xbox Cloud Gaming is launching on its Fire TV smart TVs for the first time ever. The newest models — the Fire TV 4-Series and the Fire TV Omni QLED series — are the first to support the Xbox app, and Amazon says that support for more models is “coming in the future.”

How to play Xbox games on your Fire TV

You’ll need a Bluetooth controller and an Xbox Game Pass subscription

If you have a compatible Fire TV, you can head to the Amazon Appstore now and download the Xbox app to get started.

The main caveats? To play Xbox games from the cloud on your Fire TV, you’ll need a compatible Bluetooth controller — like an Xbox Wireless Controller, Xbox Adaptive Controller, DualSense, or DualShock 4 — plus an Xbox Game Pass subscription, which starts at $10 a month for the Essential plan.

The quality of games depends on your subscription. Both the Essential and Premium plans are limited to 1080p, while the Ultimate plan lets you stream at up to 1440p. The plans also differ in the number of games you can access: Essential has the smallest catalog, while Ultimate offers over 250 titles, including the latest Xbox games on day one.

In a blog post, Amazon points out that “Fire TV customers are embracing cloud gaming in record numbers,” so it looks like more people are giving it a try. The post also notes that with Fire TV’s new Alexa+ integration, you can simply say, “Alexa, open the Xbox app,” and jump into gaming whenever you feel like it.

I tried cloud gaming on my Fire TV Stick 4K Max for the first time recently, and honestly, I was impressed. I knew the device supported it when I bought it, but I didn’t try it right away, mainly because I assumed the resolution of games wouldn’t be good, and the latency would be high. But after finally trying it, I was glad to learn I was wrong. To my surprise, games actually looked good, and while the latency was noticeable, it was bearable, and I had a ton of fun playing titles like Indiana Jones and The Great Circle. Is the Xbox Cloud Gaming experience on par with playing on an actual console? Absolutely not, but considering I was gaming on a streaming stick I paid $40 for, and I wasn’t all that upset about it.

All in all, while the Xbox app was already available on Amazon’s Fire TV Sticks and Fire TV Cube, what’s notable about this announcement is that it’s the first time it’s launching on Fire TV smart TVs. If you have one of the latest models, you can jump into Xbox Cloud Gaming without needing a streaming stick now.