Despite what an April fools video might lead players to believe, Xbox not buying steam anytime soon. Microsoft has been known to flex its purchasing power with the Xbox, buying a host of developers to add to its Xbox Game Studios portfolio. Since the launch of the Xbox One in 2014, Microsoft has made notable acquisitions of developers such as Mojang Studios, Ninja Theory, Obsidian Entertainment and Double Fine. It would then take this to the next level as it moved into the Xbox Series X/S generation, acquiring major independent publishers such as Bethesda and Activision.
Steam is still the largest PC gaming marketplace even after 20 years on the market, with over 100 million monthly users. Valve's service has thousands of games released on it each year and remains incredibly popular despite competition from the Epic Games Store. Steam also helps its case with frequent game discounts, especially during its prominent seasonal sales periods. Valve has also expanded its reach with the launch of the Steam Deck handheld in 2022, allowing players to enjoy their massive game libraries on the go.
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Xbox Steam Acquisition Searches Jump In Wake of April Fools' Day
Pure Xbox reported on an April joke about a potential Microsoft acquisition of Steam. Initially, a prominent April Fools joke discussed a program titled Xbox Game Pass Flex, a free version of Game Pass that essentially replaces load times in Xbox games with full-blown ads. Despite being just an online prank, it seemed like a reasonable announcement given the speculation that Xbox would add ads to Game Pass. Turns out, this was just a remarkable Xbox prank that went around during April Fools' Day.
Google Trends showed that the top six Xbox-related searches relate to a potential Xbox acquisition by Steam. Apparently, the spike in searches comes from a TikTok by a user named jacobweeby, who posted a video claiming that Microsoft bought Steam for $10 billion. The video, which has received over 850,000 views and over 75,000 likes in less than 24 hours, mentions that Xbox plans to combine with Steam to create a unified library across console and PC. Despite one of the video hashtags listing it as a skit, commenters were very confident that the skit was real, which likely explains the spike in Google searches.
April Fools' Day is a prime time for the gaming world to unleash fake messages on unsuspecting gamers everywhere. As usual very popular titles like Monitoring and Fortnite has added April Fools' Day content to its games this year. These pranks aren't limited to developers and publishers either, as fans and content creators with large followings will create fake news in the video game world. Jacobweeby's video is just that, and is not a legitimate indicator that Microsoft is making a deal to acquire Steam.
Still, even if Xbox isn't planning a full acquisition of Valve's platform, it's reasonable to understand why gamers would believe this news. Xbox has previously teased some Steam integration into Xbox platforms, to the point where the ROG Xbox Ally handheld is even compatible with it. Additionally, current reports about Microsoft's upcoming Xbox console, Project Helix, indicate that it will be able to play Steam games directly. So while a proper acquisition of Steam is unlikely to be in Xbox's future, this April video may not be far off what Microsoft plans to offer next-gen.
