If you bought one of LG’s high-end OLED or QNED Mini-LED TVs in the last three years, you might be pleasantly surprised to know that you can now download the Xbox app and use it to stream “hundreds” of top-tier Xbox games directly, without needing to shell out for a games console.
LG first revealed its TVs would be getting the Xbox smart TV app at CES 2025 in January, and it has now made good on that promise, bringing it to all LG television models from 2022 and later, including both OLED and LCD screens.
The company did not say why older TVs from 2021 and earlier were excluded, and it has not said if they’ll be getting the app at a later date. So it may well be due to a software issue that prevents the app from working on older models.
If you head to the LG app store, you’ll discover that the Xbox app is available to download now, though it is still in beta, so there may be one or two bugs.
But note that it’s not launching everywhere. LG specified that 24 countries will get the Xbox app, including the U.K., Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.S.
Prior to this announcement, the Xbox app could only be found on some newer Samsung TV models and Amazon Fire TV streaming sticks and TVs, so this represents a big expansion for Microsoft.
The app lets you stream Xbox games directly from cloud-based servers to the TV, so there’s no need to invest in an Xbox Series X or Series S console any more to start playing games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Hogwarts Legacy. Instead, all you have to do is invest in a Bluetooth-enabled games controller.
There are still reasons to want to buy an Xbox though, as the streamed games are not “owned” by the player, and there are hundreds more titles that cannot be accessed through the app. Nonetheless, it’s still great news for those who don’t want to invest in a console, although you’ll need to pay a subscription fee starting at $19.99 per month to actually play the games.
The app can be found in LG’s app store and also in the Gaming Portal, where you’ll find additional cloud gaming apps such as Nvidia GeForce Now, Amazon Luna and Boosteroid.
