Last year, EA announced that it would bring all of its games to Steam and also offer its EA Play subscription service on Valve’s platform.

Some EA Play games in the Xbox app are actually not available in the EA Desktop app. You have an example below with SimCity 2000 Special Edition, which isn’t available in the EA Desktop app. Worse, some EA Play games that appear on the Xbox app are actually not available in the catalog, and trying to installing them will give users confusing error messages. It’s also worth noting that not all EA Play games are currently visible in the Xbox app for Windows 10, and the app invites users to open EA Desktop to see the full list of games. The Xbox app can display the progress of the game download on the EA Desktop app, but having to use two separate game launchers isn’t exactly a great experience.

If a selection of EA Play games now appears in the Xbox app for Windows 10, all these games will be downloaded from the separate EA Desktop app instead of Microsoft’s own platform. The Windows 10 Xbox app (right) can show the download progress on the EA Desktop app (left).

Xbox game pass desktop app