Obsidian Entertainment (who recently revealed their 100-year plan, as we reported earlier) has made a surprising move with their latest game.

As of yesterday, Avowed is available to players who have purchased the more expensive version, which has received quite positive reviews so far from the studio known for Pillars of Eternity or Fallout: New Vegas. Interestingly, however, Xbox Cloud Gaming has missed out on this earlier playability. No matter which version of Avowed you paid for, you won’t be able to play the game on Redmond’s cloud service until next week… but you can play it on another!

Instead of Xbox Cloud Gaming, it’s Nvidia GeForce Now where we can now play Avowed. This is strange because Obsidian is part of Xbox Game Studios, one of Microsoft’s studios. And yet they didn’t go in-house. While it should be noted that the subscription price for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate has recently become more expensive, this seems to be a bit of a deal-breaker for gamers who might rightly expect to get early access to Obsidian’s game in return. We wouldn’t call this early access: Steam already calls it something else. This is not an incomplete game.

And then there’s the new option: games you buy can be played from the cloud. Avowed could be a great test bed for this, and if you buy the deluxe version of a game, the DLCs are also available, so in principle, the earlier playability should be a bonus. Microsoft has not yet explained why Avowed is not available on Xbox Cloud Gaming, although there are examples of people who have paid for the Premium Edition of Avowed.

This was either an oversight on Microsoft’s part or a deliberate decision to promote a competing cloud service (Nvidia is doing well anyway, except for the stock drop caused by Deepseek).

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