One of the more fascinating parts of the Xbox plan of attack for its new console is its apparent marriage of Xbox, Steam, and Epic among possibly others in a unified console experience. Having a true console like experience with a variety of PC game stores plugged in I think is a rare lane available for Xbox to try and do something other than reproduce Steam but worse, and I'm curious how it's going to go.
This being microsoft, my expectation UX wise is that similar to those Xbox ROG devices you'll have to drop to the windows desktop to install updates, and they'll probably also throw in some copilot to help you through the process. I don't think they have it in them to innovate here and make it pleasant in any meaningful way
Yeah, I agree. There are certainly engineers at Microsoft who are skilled/talented enough to do something cool. But it doesn't matter if the business people will just saddle them with bad requirements that drag the experience down.
My guess is it doesn't go well -- with Gamepass they've taught Xbox gamers not to buy games, and with Steam integration they've given Xbox gamers a competing place to buy games (where Microsoft will pay a percentage to steam!)
It'll probably turn a division of Microsoft that usually loses money into one that loses...more money.
Right and itch.io and much besides. However, these integrations are janky and not built in as first class console experiences. Not that they need to be necessarily, I think having the steam store is enough in many respects. But for me, the dream is being able to browse and install games from itch.io with the same convenience as steam itself. So there's at least notionally and unclaimed lane for providing that kind of experience. It's the only available Lane that I can think of for out-Steaming Steam.
You're not wrong, at this hour success is as much about picking up the pieces from one of the singularly worst disasters of brand confusion we've ever seen. Even this attempted recovery is a bid to get into the lane now owned by Steam.
The SteamOS is capable of getting out of the way, which is something Microsoft is pathologically incapable of designing Windows to do. And these days I think Linux and the Linux desktop are just objectively better than Windows, and the days where Windows embodied what it meant to have when anything goes PC are long gone.
So you're left with limited options. I think a first class console experience for a wide range of storefronts is the best bet to out-steam Steam but it assumes a degree of execution capability that I don't trust Microsoft to have.
