No, Xbox Is Not Buying Steam - But This April Fools Joke Fooled Thousands

Xbox is not buying Steam. Full stop. And yet, for a brief window on April Fools' Day 2026, thousands of people genuinely thought it had.

A TikTok from a creator named jacobweeby set the internet alight this week, with a video boldly claiming that Microsoft had purchased Steam for $10 billion. The pitch? Xbox and Steam would merge into a single unified library spanning console and PC. Sounds wild. Sounds expensive. And apparently, sounds convincing enough to make people forget what day it was.

Google Trends flagged a "Breakout" surge in Xbox-related searches, with the top rising queries all pointing to some variation of "did Xbox buy Steam." A Breakout, for context, means search interest shot up by 5,000% or more. All of this traced back to one TikTok video with a skit hashtag buried in the caption.

The video racked up over 850,000 views and 75,000 likes in less than 24 hours. One hashtag labelled it as a skit. Commenters largely ignored that detail entirely.

Why People Actually Fell For It

To be fair, this wasn't completely out of nowhere. Microsoft has spent the better part of a decade aggressively buying up studios. Since the Xbox One era, it has snapped up Mojang Studios, Ninja Theory, Obsidian Entertainment, Double Fine, Bethesda, and Activision. That's a lot of cheques. So when someone says "Microsoft bought another thing," the muscle memory kicks in.

Steam, for its part, is enormous. It remains the largest PC gaming marketplace even after 20 years on the market, with over 100 million monthly users, thousands of games releasing on it annually, and a near-unassailable lead despite competition from the Epic Games Store. A platform that size, theoretically absorbed into Xbox? People were ready to believe it.

And then there's the context around Game Pass. Earlier in the day, a separate April Fools' joke - a fake announcement called "Xbox Game Pass Flex" - described a free tier of Game Pass that replaced loading screens with full advertisements. That one felt plausible given ongoing speculation about Xbox exploring ads within Game Pass. If people were already primed to believe Xbox might pull something dramatic, jacobweeby's video found fertile ground.

It's Not Real, But Xbox's Steam Plans Are Closer Than You Think

Here's where it gets genuinely interesting. Microsoft isn't buying Valve's platform. Valve is privately owned, Gabe Newell isn't exactly known for selling, and a deal of that scale would face antitrust scrutiny that would make the Activision acquisition look like a minor admin task. None of that is happening.

What is happening, though, is something that nudges in a similar direction.

According to reporting from Jez Corden at Windows Central, Microsoft's next console, Project Helix, will be "the most open Xbox ever," with the ability to install and access storefronts like Steam, Epic Games, GOG, Battle.net, and more. The idea is that the console will run an Xbox-focused front-end by default, but players will be able to exit out to Windows and access their full PC libraries from there.

For the first time, an Xbox console will natively support games from both the Xbox ecosystem and third-party PC storefronts, including Steam and GOG, giving users more flexibility on where to buy their games. That's a far cry from Microsoft owning Steam. But it does close the gap between the two platforms considerably.

Xbox has also confirmed it will roll out "Xbox Mode" on Windows 11 in April 2026, letting players switch between productivity and gaming with a controller-optimised interface while keeping the openness of Windows intact. The ROG Xbox Ally handheld already previewed this setup, and Project Helix is expected to build on it.

So no, Microsoft didn't spend $10 billion on Steam. But the line between Xbox and Steam is genuinely blurring, and Xbox seems perfectly fine with that. The April Fools' video was a joke. The direction it pointed in, though? Less fictional than it looks.