How to play Steam PC games on Xbox with mouse & keyboard: CSGO, Portal, more

Bill Cooney
Xbox revenue Game Pass

A new update to Microsoft Edge for Skip-Ahead Alpha players actually allows you to play Steam games like CSGO right on your Xbox with a mouse and keyboard.

Edge has always been the built-in internet browser for the Xbox — which makes sense as they’re both Microsoft products — but a recent upgrade could allow everyone to play Steam games right on their console soon.

The browser was only added to Xbox systems back in March of 2021, and on April 26 a new update dropped that allows Skip-Ahead Alpha players to use mouse and keyboard with Edge, and yes, that includes playing games, but you’ll need a PC with the games you want to play already installed.

How to play Steam games on Xbox

Some lucky few can already play PC games like CSGO on Xbox.

For those who aren’t Skip-Ahead Alpha users, you might have to wait a little while longer to try this upgrade, unless you happen to get accepted to the invite-only program.

Let’s get to how it works though; once the update is finally available to you, all you have to do is plug in a mouse and keyboard and you’ll be able to fully use both to scroll around, type, and even play games.

You can’t just go to Steam and start playing though, in order to play Portal, Team Fortress 2, or whatever else you want you’ll need to use a third-party system like Parsec that allows you to connect to your gaming PC from anywhere.

Nvidia’s GeForce Now would be a lot of people’s first choice here, but — for whatever reason — it doesn’t support Edge just yet. Hopefully more support is coming with future updates, but for now, this is how you can play Steam games on Xbox:

  1. Set up a third part PC mirror application on your gaming PC.
  2. Connect a mouse and keyboard to your Xbox via the USB ports.
  3. Open the Microsoft Edge browser.
  4. Connect to your PC mirror, and start playing games with full mouse and keyboard on Xbox.

Video starts at 1:26 for mobile viewers.

It should be noted that there are a few bugs that bring up the on-screen keyboard while playing, and you’ll obviously be playing against other PC players.

Like we mentioned though this is only available to an exclusive few at the moment, but it should be made available for everyone soon and there are a lot of neat possibilities for what can be done with full mouse and keyboard support in Microsoft Edge.

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