A new project from the developer of Heroic Launcher, titled Xodus, is aiming to bring Xbox Game Pass to Linux and macOS.
The development team behind Heroic Launcher is now focused on making Xbox PC games, including access to the Game Pass catalog, available on Linux and macOS via project Xodus. According to the its GitHub page, the project is an “open-source reverse-engineering effort” designed to get GDK-based Xbox PC titles running outside Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Xodus is tackling several components required to make the games work, rather than functioning solely as a launcher. Its core project, written in Rust, handles authentication, token exchange, package downloads and license acquisition. Other repositories are dedicated to implementing xgameruntime.dll, documenting its internals through clean-room reverse engineering, handling Xbox authentication, parsing MSIXVC containers, and integrating the necessary Wine and Proton modifications.
The project has already made noteworthy progress, as its developers have figured out authorization and game downloads, with the focus now being the Xbox game SDK. Several additional tasks still remain, including improving download resumption and caching, adding token caching, supporting resumable extraction and expanding game bundles.
Xodus also maintains its own patched versions of Wine and Proton, potentially providing the compatibility layer needed for Xbox PC games to operate on Linux and macOS. The project has no affiliation with Microsoft and Xbox, and those interested are warned to use it at their own risk.
While Xodus is currently a work in progress, if it can successfully reproduce the required Xbox runtime and SDK functionality, it may eventually provide Linux and Mac users with a new way to access a major portion of the Xbox PC ecosystem.
A few months ago, modder Andy Nguyen managed to get the Linux OS running on the PS5. The Linux port is publicly available, allowing users running supported versions of the console’s firmware to get a fully functional Steam Machine experience. Read about it here.
