Xbox accidentally shows off a Steam filter in a possible UI update, immediately removes any evidence of its mistake

Xbox shared a blog post earlier today that’s mostly just a bunch of self-congratulatory waffle about how easy it is to play games you own on the service anywhere, and for the most part, it wasn’t very interesting. There was one notable thing about it that has now been scrubbed from the post: an image of a bunch of devices you can play Xbox games on with some new UI, and oh, would you look at that, one of the filters for your game library is for Steam. Now isn’t that interesting?

This was actually noticed by The Verge, who reached out to Microsoft about it, except that attempt at contact caused the tech company to apparently quickly remove said image from the post. As The Verge points out, the original image that mentions Steam is almost definitely just a mock-up, you can see that two of the filters listed both say “Owned”, so if Microsoft does roll out this UI across Xbox and its various Xbox apps, it might not look exactly the same.

That doesn’t mean Steam’s inclusion was a mistake either. The Verge claims that sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans have said they’re currently working on an update for the Xbox app that shows any game you have installed on your PC. This’ll apparently include both Steam and the Epic Games Store, and your games will be labelled as such in the app.

These plans for an Xbox app update are apparently still quite early, so again, this feature might not get released. Last year Xbox head Phil Spencer did say in an interview with Polygon that he’s interested in seeing storefronts like itch.io and the Epic Games Store on Xbox, so perhaps this is an initial attempt at making this happen.