Following up on a recent report indicating that Xbox might be looking forward to potentially leaving Steam behind as the primary way of selling its games on PC, Windows Central’s Jez Corden has offered some clarification on the matter. He has noted that, at least for now, there are seemingly no plans for Xbox to take its games off Steam.
Taking a long-term look at Xbox’s business strategy going forward, the company seems to be banking quite heavily on PC gaming. Even Project Helix has been described by various people in the company as being a more open platform than one would expect from a console. According to Corden, the company likely doesn’t expect to sell too many units of its hardware, at least for now, due to component shortages hiking up the price. This means that Microsoft as a whole is more likely to weather the storm by keeping its PC games available on the largest marketplaces it can.
However, Steam doesn’t seem to be the company’s only strategy for PC gaming. Game Pass is also noted as being quite important. Corden describes the subscription service as being “designed to capture a separate audience from Steam, targeting users who are perhaps more inclined to otherwise stick to free-to-play titles or seek savings in as many ways as possible.”
Further down the line, there is seemingly also the possibility for Microsoft and Blizzard to open up the latter’s Battle.net launcher to third-party developers and publishers. While details about this are scarce, according to Corden, there is no evidence that the plan is being canceled.
Battle.net already comes with a massive player base thanks to it being the only way to access World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft Classic, and the StarCraft games. Following Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, we’ve seen the launcher slowly being opened up to include other games by developers under the Xbox Game Studios banner, including titles like DOOM: The Dark Ages, The Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, and even Call of Duty. The fact that users can link their Battle.net accounts to their Xbox accounts further bridges the two services, opening up the potential for even more games coming to Blizzard’s storefront.
Corden also brought up Xbox’s “Positron” system through which users can convert their game discs into digital licenses. Since many of Microsoft’s games tend to be Xbox Play Anywhere releases, this opens up yet another door for the company to bring more PC gamers into its own ecosystem. Details about Positron are still scarce, however, with more expected to be revealed later this month. It could be easy to imagine pairing Positron with the company’s backwards compatibility emulators to help it grow its PC player base.
As for short-term business, however, Corden has noted that Xbox PC still faces several hurdles, including the fact that it is disliked by indie developers due to issues like long certification processes and policies that add complexity to the general process of releasing a game. It is also worth noting that Steam continues to dominate the PC market, and even Epic Games’ Fortnite-fueled deep pockets haven’t been able to keep up.
