Yesterday, Microsoft kickstarted its this year's efforts with the big Xbox Developer_Direct 2025 show. Microsoft's now annual "mini" showcase in January highlights major upcoming Xbox titles for the first half of the year typically, with occasional guest spots from third party developers. This year, we got a big deep dive into DOOM: The Dark Ages, South of Midnight, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and a surprise look at Ninja Gaiden 4, published by Xbox itself.
As part of the festivities, Koei Tecmo also dropped a comprehensive remake of Ninja Gaiden 2, dubbed Ninja Gaiden 2 Black. The rebuilt game showcases its brutal hack n' slashery with modern Unreal Engine trappings, sporting 4K 120 FPS on Xbox Series X and PC. Ninja Gaiden 2 Black is $49.99 to buy outright, but Microsoft and Koei Tecmo slapped the game straight into Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, giving users instant access.
PC Game Pass subscribers are finding out that, unfortunately, the Microsoft Store version of the game has some glaring omissions.
As noted by Digital Foundry's John Linneman on BlueSky, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black for PC has a big feature disparity between the Steam version and the Microsoft Store version. Ninja Gaiden 2 Black on PC Game Pass, for example, does not have NVIDIA DLSS, whereas the Steam version does have it. Since the game is quite demanding, having access to NVIDIA super sampling technology would make the game more performant for many PCs, and the fact PC Game Pass version is inferior highlights an ongoing issue I've noticed with Microsoft Store versions of PC games.
The Microsoft Store does have huge advantages, particularly when you factor in Xbox Play Anywhere. I can take my copy of Persona 5 Royal, for example, across to my phone via Xbox Cloud Gaming, my sofa on my Xbox Series X, or on any of my PC gaming handhelds or laptops — all with the same save file. Steam Cloud works the same way generally, but it doesn't have a great cloud service attached just yet (besides NVIDIA GeForce Now separately). So at least for the time being, I do prefer to play my PC games on the Microsoft Store where applicable. But it's disappointing that there are often version discrepancies between the Microsoft Store and Steam versions of games.
Another recent example I was looking into was Forspoken, which is several versions behind on the Microsoft Store versus the Steam version, missing similar features. An earlier example too was Death Stranding, which, until the recent Xbox port, was also several versions behind Steam, and also missed out on DLC too. I suspect that for a lot of developers, it simply isn't worth updating the Microsoft Store version of a lot of their games, owing to low use. But it's a chicken and egg situation for Microsoft — if the quality isn't there, the users won't be there, but if the users aren't there, then developers won't be there, and so on.
It's a complicated issue to solve, and one Microsoft is familiar with (if you remember the notorious app gap on Windows Phone). Bringing Xbox game development closer to PC game development could help solve the issue down the line, so developers only need to update one package across a larger install base — but that won't solve the growing problem today. As more and more games come to PC Game Pass, Microsoft risks expanding the quality disparity too.
