Samsung TVs are getting this cool free upgrade

(Image credit: Samsung)

published 2 July 2022

Great news for gamers who own 2022 Samsung TVs: the new Samsung Gaming Hub is now rolling out to the best Samsung TVs including its Neo QLED 8K TVs, Neo QLED 4K TVs, OLED TVs and the Smart Monitor Series too. And that’s not all. As of today, the Xbox app is available for the same TVs so you can play hundreds of cloud-enabled Xbox games without needing a console.

As exciting as the Xbox app is, it’s just the start. Samsung hasn’t just teamed up with Microsoft. It’s also bringing Nvidia GeForce NOW, Google Stadia, Utomik and in the not too distant future, Amazon Luna.

If you don’t already have a PS5 or Xbox Series X but you do have one of Samsung’s 2022 TVs, the Samsung Gaming Hub is a massive upgrade.

All the games, no console required

We've known about the Samsung Gaming Hub for a while now: it was announced at CES 2022. It's essentially the gaming version of the TV hub that shows you all your available streaming services, so if you subscribe to, say, Xbox Game Pass and Google Stadia then you'll be able to play them right on your TV. All you need to provide is a controller.

I've been doing a fair bit of cloud gaming lately and I'm genuinely impressed. On a decent broadband connection the only indication that I'm not playing a native game, other than the initial load time, is that it's in HD rather than the 4K my consoles put out. So it's testament to just how powerful today's best TVs have become that you can access these streaming services without needing a dongle or additional hardware of any kind.

The Samsung Gaming Hub is rolling out to compatible TVs starting this week, and the Xbox app is available from today.

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).