How to play Xbox and PC Game Pass games on Steam Deck

Are you looking to play Xbox and PC Game Pass games on your Steam Deck? Then you’re not alone. Here is a complete tutorial to get you started.

Valve‘s Steam Deck has garnered the attention of the gaming community at large, emerging as a standout handheld gaming console. Given its impressive specs, affordable price tag, and vast game collection, it’s clear why competitors might feel a twinge of jealousy.

How about setting up Game Pass games on your Steam Deck? It’s possible but trickier than you might expect.

It boils down to Microsoft‘s Universal Windows Platform (UWP) framework. Engineered to be secure, this software keeps you from installing your games by blocking direct installations on the Steam Deck. As a result, you can’t simply transfer and play your top Xbox and PC Game Pass games on this portable gaming PC.

However, all is not lost. With the right tweaks in the settings, you can enjoy your Game Pass gems on your Steam Deck in no time if you know the right keys to press.

Playing on Game Pass on Windows via the Steam Deck

If you’re the type of person to want to play games with a local version, your only choice is to go with a dual-boot Windows setup.

This will also allow you to play games like Modern Warfare 2, Destiny 2, and Fortnite.

How to play Game Pass games on Steam Deck: Streaming

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With UWP in place, there are a few methods to get Game Pass games working on the Steam Deck, the easiest of which is to stream them.

This is the best option for those that don’t want to install Windows 11 on their Steam Deck, which takes a lot more work due to its unique hardware. You can’t just install and go, there are drivers and more to install. All in all, streaming is currently the easiest way to go about this.

As long as you use a Chromium browser, you should be able to stream games just fine. Chromium powers both Chrome and Edge, so we’ll go with Edge for simplicities sake.

Firefox won’t work, so you’ll need to grab Edge from the Discover app store.

Now let’s add it to Steam. In Desktop Mode, press the plus button and then choose Edge from the list of apps. Once we’ve done that, we can move on.

Now, you want to then open Konsole, the terminal app on SteamOS. This will require you to copy-paste the following in:

flatpak –user override –filesystem=/run/udev:ro com.microsoft.Edge

With this copied in, it’ll give Edge access to your controls when we swap over to Gaming Mode.

To access the on screen keyboard in Desktop Mode, press Steam+X.

However, navigating to the website you’ll need each and every time you load up Edge in Gaming Mode will be a hassle. Rather than doing that each time, Microsoft has cooked up some parameters for the Steam Deck to follow.

Find Edge in your Steam Library, right-click, and press properties. Then find Launch Options and copy-paste the following after the @@u @@ (be sure to keep the space):

–window-size=1024,640 –force-device-scale-factor=1.25 –device-scale-factor=1.25 –kiosk “https://www.xbox.com/play”

Save and you can now exit out to Gaming Mode. Inside Gaming Mode, when you load up Edge for the first time, you should be sent straight to Xbox Cloud Streaming.

What is UWP?

Microsoft

On Windows, the games aren’t installed as your usual .exe, and then a list of files that it pulls from to run the game. That’s all there, but is converted and sorted as a UWP, Universal Windows Platform. This essentially allows developers to create an application (in this case a game) that then will go out to all of Microsoft’s platforms.

UWP originally held a lot more weight when Windows 8 came about. Since Microsoft ditched the Metro UI (may god rest its soul) and the Windows Store doesn’t really do all that much outside installing Game Pass and streaming apps, it is now just a cumbersome file type to prevent piracy.

You can see our guides on how to install Good Old Games and Epic Games Store titles to your Steam Deck, as well as how to play your free Amazon Prime Gaming games.