I recently listened to a game industry news report from Bellular suggesting that Steam could be looking to partner with Microsoft to bring it’s store to the Xbox platform.
Immediately I began to wonder how the Playstation exclusivity deal would be addressed if suddenly Boundless were, in a round about way, available on the next gen Xbox.
Could we finally see the long standing wish for Xbox cross-play realized? What if Sony revokes its backing for Boundless? What position does this put Square Enix in?
That seems highly unlikely because that would cut into the main reason to sell the xbox… which is to sell software… gaming consoles normally sold at a loss and the company makes up the money on licensing.
Is it? Have you looked at Xbox gamepass? I don’t think they are going for the same market strategy as before. Now, I think they are going for subscriptions over software sales. And if they could sell access to steam for an extra $5 on top of gamepass, they would have the console that has “All of the games”.
I really doubt Microsoft plans to bring “Steam” (in full as a platform) to the Xbox Series X. It would require a radical amount of changes from Valve to adapt it the locked down platform that is Xbox (or any console). Which is heavily against a lot of Valve’s direction (the fear of Windows 10 becoming more locked down is literally the reason Valve tried to make a Steam console and partnered with Ubuntu).
It would be awesome if the Series X could be “unlocked” and work like a normal Windows 10 computer (I would legit just buy two of them and use that as my new PC upgrade), but seems unlikely, it would have been announced by now. If they ever did anything like that, it would be unlikely that could function as an Xbox console and a Windows 10 computer because of the locked down nature of the Xbox console environment (it would be kind of like unlocking the bootloader on an Android phone).
That being said, I could see Microsoft and Valve partnering to bring Remote Play to the Series X. Similar to how Microsoft wants to push Xbox titles to every platform, I could see Valve wanting to make Steam more accessible and available on more platforms and bring a streaming app to Xbox would be an amazing start.
It would be very interesting if MS partnered with valve to bring at least some games over to Xbox - and it would kind of make sense for them too. Interesting rumor.
They never partnered with Ubuntu (there was lots of talk and I got all Valve’s games for free out of it). They ended up basing SteamOS on Debian instead. I can no longer remember the details on why, I vaguely remember it was because Ubuntu’s 6-month rolling release caused too much churn or else the 2-year LTS release cycle was not agile enough to keep up with driver releases but it may have been intellectual property issues. It’s been a lot of years since I was involved and I am now old and confused.
Rumour has it the whole SteamOS effort was because of fear of UWP locking out unsanctioned vendors from PC games much like the Apple Store does, and I think they were right to worry. Now that everyone else has a walled-garden store and UWP is a bust it’s less of a concern.
Valve is a business first and foremost and if they think it will net them revenue, I think they’ll go for it.
Yeah, that is my bad. I thought it was Ubuntu. I knew it was a Debian based OS, just thought it was Ubuntu.
I swear I remember reading/seeing an interview recently (in the last ~6 months) that actually confirmed it. It was something along the lines that Valve was actually very help with how Microsoft is going back to being more open and they were excited to get more Microsoft titles on Steam, but it also included that the fear of Windows 10 becoming more locked down was the whole reason that for their whole push into consoles.
Well if it’s projected to be more profitable for both sides then they’ll do what they have to do to make it work. I’m sure a lot of indie PC games will still be PC only but if all these Xbox players start catching that steam fever and buy every game that goes on sale like my brother does, Microsoft and Valve will both be rolling in it.
Also wouldn’t be surprising if Xbox reworks their interface for those who only want to use mouse and keyboard. Then the only difference is performance.