The devious people over at Xbox have announced a new feature for their Xbox PC app, as well as for the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X when they launch later this year: an aggregated library of games, letting you see and launch any of your installed games, regardless of which storefront they are on.
The new feature was announced by the Xbox Insiders program, meaning anyone who is part of the program will get access to it straight away. The rest of us chumps will have to wait for a little while.
According to the blog post, the Xbox PC App will now be able to show any games you have installed on your machine from any “supported PC storefront”, although the post stops short of specifying which storefronts are actually on that list. Presumably, Steam and Epic are included.
Of course, you’ll also be able to launch the games straight from the Xbox app as well.
“With the aggregated gaming library, players can conveniently launch games from Xbox, Game Pass, Battle.net and other leading PC storefronts from a single library within the Xbox PC app. Whether you’re on a Windows PC or a handheld device, your Xbox library, hundreds of Game Pass titles, and all your installed games from leading PC storefronts will now be at your fingertips,” says the post.
It’ll be interesting to see if this is just a first step toward a deeper integration with Steam. Right now, displaying installed games and launching them is a very basic addition, one that requires almost zero support from Steam or Epic to do. Plenty of other storefronts and apps already do this, in fact.
But given the various rumours hinting toward the next Xbox being even closer to a PC than before, this step could potentially indicate Xbox gradually moving toward fully supporting Steam. I’ll be honest, though: I don’t believe we’ll see Steam on an actual Xbox console. As crazy as the world is, though, who the hell actually knows.