It started with a suggestion, but over the last week a small team of XboxEra community members built a rather splendid guide in Google Sheets that lists every known Play Anywhere title on the Xbox Store. This simple but comprehensive guide has one goal: to help the greater Xbox community find out what games come with a PC and a console version and, even better, should help you find out what games you own now that have a PC version that you never knew about.
Not only that, we hope to share information on the quirks of some of these titles have on the Xbox platform and to be made aware of any potential issues with said games. Oh, and we’d like to raise awareness on a rather serious issue: that being how the Xbox PC application fails to show the very games that it sells.
You can find the whole Google Sheet thisaway, all credits going to CryOn, Terrin, and mrhipshot for the creation of this beautiful piece of kit. This spreadsheet was created through hours of searching and personal research into our own libraries. But we can’t say this list is perfect—if you have any information on a game listed or even know of a title that isn’t on our sheet, please let us know and we’ll get that sorted ASAP. A Google Account will be required to submit a request, so do keep that in mind. Our site will also have a web-friendly version of the sheet very soon.
Not every game supports every Xbox Live feature and we want to help make that clear with this list. And we’d like to keep this list focused on Play Anywhere titles, specifically those with a PC and console version. With the likely imminent release of Cloud Gaming support for Game Pass Ultimate members, we’d prefer to list games that have a buy once, play anywhere model.
Oh, but before you go, I encourage you to read on to see why this Sheet even came to be. Trust me, it’ll give you insight on just how crummy the Xbox Store is.
See, if you aren’t aware of what the Play Anywhere programme is, you can think of it as a cooler way of saying “cross-buy”. Microsoft has supported dual entitlements for PC and console for years now, encouraging developers to build a game that can be played on the big screen at home to a monitor or an on-the-go device. Ideally, this game would not only offer two versions of the game for the same price but also support Xbox features such as achievements, network, and cloud saving. Pick up and Play Anywhere, a perfect motto for the company’s recent advertising push that pitches everything with a screen and controller support to be an Xbox.
And hey, it’s a noble goal. I think we’re at a point where just about everything is gaming-capable. Be it a native client or over cloud, making games more accessible without having to buy specific hardware is a great idea. And Microsoft has done a great job of getting more developers on-board with the programme—as of our current count, we are well over one-thousand supported Play Anywhere games on the platform. And the number is only going up thanks to ports created for Game Pass and likely effort on Microsoft’s end to make it as painless as possible to create two versions of one game for developers. A lot of contributing factors, like PC versions increasing the reach of a game plus the popularity of handheld devices like the ASUS ROG Ally.
But there’s just one teeny tiny problem: visibility of these games are effectively nonexistent. There’s no real way to search for Play Anywhere supported titles on either console or PC. Microsoft themselves seemed to have stopped using the Play Anywhere tag, too, making it even harder to find games that support cross-buy. Heck, let’s talk about the PC version for a minute—the Xbox PC app has a number of issues related to discoverability and visibility. Did you know that, of the thousand or so Play Anywhere games, apparently 390 games will not even show up on the Xbox PC app? That means whether you search for these games or look through your library in the app, these games will not show up whatsoever.
Imagine that—games you own and have played on console that also have PC versions, except you’d have never known that unless you somehow spotted it on the game’s store page (never mind haphazard presence of Play Anywhere tagging on newer titles) or if someone told you. Games have also retroactively gotten PC versions too and have become Play Anywhere, but again the likelihood of you ever knowing is zilch.
Though often it feels like the other way around.
But what makes this more incredulous is the Xbox PC app’s inability to display every Xbox-enabled game. There are games on the platform right now that have an Xbox Live presence but can only be found on the Microsoft Store app. This doesn’t affect Play Anywhere titles specifically, mind you, even PC-only Xbox games aren’t showing up in the app such as ‘Xuan Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains‘. Why this is even a problem is known only to Akatosh, but it has been an issue for years. The Xbox PC app quite literally isn’t doing its job—it’s madness that it could even be considered a storefront when it doesn’t even show a third of its products. Nobody is going to the Microsoft Store to look for Xbox games, they’re going to the Xbox app for that! Ubisoft and EA’s launchers can breathe easy knowing that they can at least properly list all of the games that they’re selling.
While Microsoft has recently made it easier to see what platforms a game supports, it still doesn’t address the Xbox Store’s discoverability of these titles (nor the Xbox PC app’s visibility issues). And thus, our spreadsheet was born. With this, we hope to not only highlight the many games (indies and big!) that support one of Xbox’s best features, but it also a personal hope of mine that Microsoft finally get off their high horse and fix their Xbox Storefront on PC.
Because as it stands now, “Everything is an Xbox” only goes so far when supported by a woefully equipped digital storefront.
