We can now download and play Xbox Game Pass games directly on the Steam Deck, thanks to Xodus Nexus.
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There are a few games or services that, no matter what, we haven’t been able to enjoy on the Steam Deck. Whether it’s due to a lack of compatibility or the service doesn’t support it, we haven’t been able to. One of the more devastating services not available on the Steam Deck would be Xbox Game Pass. This subscription service is so popular and constantly has new games added to it, and it’s a shame that we have only been able to enjoy it via cloud streaming and not downloaded locally. However, as of today, that has now changed.
Recently, I talked about a project called Xodus. This is a special project being developed that allows us to download and run games from the Microsoft Store on Linux. Since this is on Linux, it also applies to the Steam Deck (and Steam Machine). The project is still being worked on, and as far as I was aware, it wasn’t ready for prime time. But it seems I was wrong, and a new community main project has integrated it and is allowing us to download and play games that we have from the Xbox Game Pass, and it’s incredible.
Xodus Nexus is an open-source launcher developed by domsvoboda. It utilizes Xodus in different ways to make sure we can sign in to our Xbox account, check the licenses, download packages, and then run the game. It all comes together in the launcher, which houses its own runtime and allows us to play our games from Game Pass. Not every game works completely; there are some that don’t, like The Witcher 3, Gears of War 4, Farming Simulator 25, and other UWP games, but these could be patched to work in the near future. However, newer games like Gears of War: E-Day and Minecraft Dungeons 2 both work and are playable online.
Downloading and setting up is relatively easy, but if you need some help getting it going, you can follow our guide on how to get Xbox Game Pass Games on your Steam Deck.
What makes it so amazing is that it works. Finally, we can play our Game Pass games on the Steam Deck and Steam Machine without issue. Even cloud saves are supported on some games, allowing us to continue playing our Game Pass games from where we left off on an Xbox or Windows PC.
And with the latest update to the launcher, it has experimental Steam Deck support. This means that if we add the launcher to Steam, we will be able to control it with our gamepad. It is a little clunky in its current state, but it does work, and I would consider it navigable. It’s easiest to just use your finger to touch the screen, but you don’t have to. Either way, it works, and that is all that matters.
Performance for some of these games may not be as good as it would be if you played on Steam directly, usually due to the lack of a shared shader cache. But that doesn’t change the fact that we can now access, download, and play our games from our Xbox Game Pass libraries. I can’t remember how many times the lack of Game Pass has been brought up by so many people as one of the big flaws of the Deck, but no longer will it be something we have to compromise on. I’m looking forward to seeing this project develop and more games becoming playable, and this is most likely one of the best things to happen to the Deck recently.
Xodus Nexus can be downloaded directly from GitHub.
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