If you’ve been keeping an eye on the landscape of PC gaming, you’ve likely noticed the quiet but steady hum of change. For years, the conversation around power efficiency and portability has been a tug-of-war between raw performance and battery life. But today, Microsoft is blurring those lines in a way that could fundamentally change how we play—especially if you’re a fan of handheld devices.
Microsoft has officially announced that the Xbox app is now natively available on all Arm-based Windows 11 PCs. This isn’t just a small software update; it’s a significant milestone in Microsoft’s long-running quest to make Windows on Arm a true contender in the gaming world.
The Tech Behind the Magic
So, how did we get here? For a long time, the biggest hurdle for Arm-based devices (like those running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips) was the software gap. Most PC games are built for traditional x86 or x64 architecture. To run them on Arm, you need a translator.
Enter the Prism emulator. Microsoft has been quietly refining this tool behind the scenes. In a crucial update deployed in late 2025, Prism received a massive upgrade: support for AVX and AVX2 instruction sets.
For the non-technical folks out there, think of AVX and AVX2 as the language that modern games use to process complex graphics and physics efficiently. Without this translation layer, games simply wouldn’t run—or they’d run poorly. With this update, the door is flung wide open. Microsoft claims that over 85 percent of the Game Pass catalog now runs on Arm PCs. That is a staggering figure that moves the platform from “niche experiment” to “viable gaming machine.”
Why This Matters for Gamers
What does this mean for you, the player? It means you can walk into the Microsoft Store (or scroll through the Xbox app on your PC), pick a game from Game Pass, download it, and play it on an Arm device. No hoops to jump through. Stream from the cloud, or download locally—the experience is now consolidated into one familiar app.
But there’s another layer to this that speaks to the multiplayer crowd. We’ve seen competitors like Valve’s Steam Deck make huge strides in Linux-based gaming, but they still struggle with one thing: anti-cheat software. Popular titles that rely on kernel-level anti-cheat (like Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat) have historically been a sticking point for Linux compatibility.
Windows on Arm, however, bridges that gap. Because it runs the Windows operating system (albeit translated for Arm architecture), it supports these anti-cheat solutions seamlessly. This means you aren’t just limited to single-player indie titles; you have access to the vast majority of online multiplayer games without the headache of compatibility issues. Compared to what’s available on other handheld operating systems, the library here is significantly wider.
The Road to Arm: A Personal Shift
It’s easy to forget that Microsoft’s push for Arm hasn’t been a sprint; it’s been a marathon. We can trace this journey back to their own Surface hardware and the Copilot+ PC program launched back in 2024. Microsoft invested heavily in showing that Arm could be more than just a mobile chip—it could power real computers.
Fast forward to today, and the ecosystem is finally maturing. Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon chips—announced just last year—are boasting speeds and efficiencies that rival traditional x86 processors. While Microsoft’s handheld efforts have traditionally relied on AMD chips (seen in devices like the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X), the landscape is widening.
When you combine the software support (the Xbox app and Prism update) with the hardware capabilities of the latest Qualcomm chips, a picture starts to form. It looks a lot like a dedicated, Windows-based handheld gaming device.
The Future is Handheld
This news feels like a precursor. The dots are connecting: Qualcomm teasing high-performance silicon, Microsoft optimizing Windows for low-power architectures, and game developers increasingly supporting day-one releases on PC.
It’s not hard to imagine a future where a “Xbox Handheld”—running on a custom Snapdragon chip with full Windows 11 support—drops sooner rather than later. A device that plays the Xbox Game Pass catalog natively, without streaming, while lasting hours on a single charge? That’s the dream.
For now, current owners of Surface Pro and other Copilot+ PCs can celebrate. The divide between “gaming PC” and “ultra-portable laptop” just got a whole lot thinner. Whether you’re catching up on Starfield during a commute or grinding out matches in Call of Duty from the couch, the Xbox app is finally there to meet you where you are.