EA and Comcast announced today that they are launching an all new games streaming service. It is called Xfinity Games, and you don’t need anything to run it, other than a supported Xfinity set-top box- your smartphone or tablet can act as a controller.

Xfinity Games only supports EA’s mobile titles, as opposed to their console efforts, but EA’s mobile titles are still fairly impressive- some of the supported games include FIFA Soccer 13, Plants vs. Zombies, and NBA Jam. The full list is longer, and can be perused on the Xfinity Games website.

Personally, I am not seeing the need for this service at all- if I want to play smartphone or tablet games, and I have to use those as the controller for these games anyway, I would just… play those games on my smartphone or tablet, rather than via streaming? Especially since a lot of these games are online and social feature centric, and Comcast has confirmed that online functionality won’t work on these games while streaming.

It just sounds like a mess.

If you own an Xbox One, and your internet service provider is Comcast, then you know playing games over Wifi might get… problematic sometimes, due to a bug with IPv6 network addresses. Well, Comcast hears you, and it’s currently working with Microsoft to fix the issue.

“Comcast and Microsoft are aware of a software issue affecting the ability of Xbox One users to play some games online. This issue is only observed when the Xbox One is connected to a network via WiFi and when that network also has an IPv6 address. In those conditions online gameplay for some titles may not work.

“We anticipate that Microsoft will release a software update after the holidays that will resolve this issue.”

Meanwhile, Comcast suggests that the small number of games that cannot be played online over Wifi be played through an ethernet cable instead of wifi.

We’ll keep you posted on further developments.