Microsoft has debuted one of their best services on Steam, highlighting its huge potential.
Xbox cloud saves is a big feature that Xbox already offers as part of Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere. Xbox Play Anywhere allows you to buy one copy of a game on Xbox, and play it on PC and Xbox. This feature isn’t available on every game yet, but there are more games on Xbox Store that offers this then there are games that don’t.
Game Pass, of course, has specific tiers that gives you a pool of rotating and permanent titles to play as part of the subscription. In both cases, Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere can allow you to buy a game to play on both Xbox and PC. Thanks to Xbox’s cloud saves feature, you can play the same game save between both platforms.
As reported by Windows Central, Microsoft has brought Xbox cloud saves to Steam, for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. This means, if you buy Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Steam, and you have it on Xbox, you can use the same save for the game across different platforms.
That includes both an Xbox Series X, an Xbox Series S, the Xbox app on Windows, or streaming via xCloud. Of course, it’s clear that this feature is one for the high rollers who can afford to play on PC and consoles at the same time. It’s possible that some gamers with Game Pass Ultimate will play it over the cloud in some scenarios, but let’s be honest: that player is a high roller too.
For those who were wondering, unfortunately, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle can’t play on the Steam Deck. We already pointed out the steep system requirements for the game made it clear that this was the case, but we can also corroborate with this report from SteamDeckHQ.
But really, this is about more than MachineGames’ latest title. Microsoft has not quite made Xbox cloud saving universally usable everywhere, but this is one step forward to doing so. They already have tons of games on Steam, such as Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Killer Instinct, that could make use of this feature.
And the more Xbox expands its features, the more it becomes like its parent company Microsoft. And Microsoft works with so many of their competitors, like Apple on one end, and all their hardware OEMs on the other. As Satya Nadella has gamely shown to their investors, working together with everyone instead of fighting to corner market share has allowed them to gaining more market share in the end.
