Xbox Game Pass games might soon work on Linux thanks to this open-source project

Published Aug 10, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary Xodus could let Xbox PC games and Game Pass PC run locally on Linux, ending Windows lock-in. The project can download and decrypt MSIXVC packages; next: SDK and Xbox Gaming Runtime recreation for Wine. Big win for Linux gaming; could remove Game Pass' Windows-only barrier and preserve cloud save sync. It looks like Xbox PC games and Xbox Game Pass PC could soon be playable locally on Linux. The team behind Heroic Games Launcher, a launcher that supports multiple storefronts, is working on Xodus, an open-source project that aims to free Microsoft's Xbox PC games from the confines of Windows 11 (via Videocardz). The project can currently download and decrypt MSIXVC packages, and in a recent Reddit comment, a developer from the team (imLinguin) confirmed that game downloads are working. Next up in the development process is the game SDK required actually to run the games on Linux. Other key things that need to get done include recreating the Xbox Gaming Runtime to the point where titles can function through Wine, a compatibility layer that lets you run Windows applications on Linux. Xodus could be huge for Linux gaming Linux gaming keeps getting better and better Credit: Videocardz Work is currently underway on both these aspects of the project, based on Xodus' GitHub page. It's worth noting that Xodus is targeting games that use both GDK and MSIXVC formats, so titles that feature UWP that were released during the Windows 8 and early Windows 10 era won't be supported by the platform. This means that older Game Pass titles like Forza Horizon 4 and Gears of War 4 won't run through Xodus. Regardless, this would be a pretty substantial win for the fast-growing Linux gaming space if Xodus ends up working well. Part of why I haven't taken the Linux plunge on my desktop gaming PC or my ROG Xbox Ally X is that a lot of my gaming is done through my PC Game Pass subscription. It's a really cheap way to have access to a wide variety of new video games. I also appreciate the cloud-based save functionality because it easily syncs my progress between my gaming PC and whatever Windows 11-based handheld I'm using at the time.