Cross Platform Games: Switch and Xbox

One of you bought a Switch, one of you bought an Xbox

It is the most common mixed-console pairing in a household, because the two machines do not compete - a Switch is what someone buys for Mario and handheld play, an Xbox is what someone buys for everything else. Then you want to play together, and you discover that the two libraries barely overlap.

They overlap more than you think, but not where you would expect. Almost nothing Nintendo publishes will ever appear on Xbox, so Mario Kart, Smash and Mario Party are permanently off the table. What does bridge the two is the third-party crossplay catalog - and it happens to include some of the best group games ever made, starting with one that Microsoft itself owns.

Minecraft is the answer, and it is not close

Minecraft is the strongest Switch-to-Xbox pick on this page for three reasons. It runs the Bedrock edition on both platforms, so the two of you are literally in the same version of the game. It supports four-player split-screen on the Xbox side, so a couch group and a Switch player can be in one world together. And it is a Microsoft game, which means it is on Game Pass and the Xbox player may already own it.

The one thing to get right is which Minecraft you buy. The Java edition that PC players often mean does not crossplay with anything on a console. Buy the console version on both machines. Our Minecraft review covers the trap in detail, because it is the most expensive misunderstanding in this whole category.

The free tier does most of the work

After Minecraft, the strongest Switch-to-Xbox games are free, which makes this pairing unusually cheap to solve. Fortnite has full crossplay everywhere and both of you almost certainly already have an account. Rocket League is five-minute car football with full crossplay and it scaled all the way down to Switch, which tells you how gently it runs. Fall Guys is the low-stakes option where nobody needs to be good.

Among Us is free on phones and a couple of dollars on consoles, with full crossplay, and it scales from four players to fifteen - so it also covers the evening when three more friends turn up. The full free list is on our free games hub.

The paid picks worth the money

Overcooked! All You Can Eat is the best paid pick for this pairing: both Overcooked games remastered with full crossplay across every platform, local and online. Human: Fall Flat costs less than lunch, takes eight players and crossplays. Moving Out 2 is the same energy as Overcooked with more forgiving assist options. Terraria is the deep one - eight-player sandbox co-op, cheap, with crossplay across most platforms provided both of you are on the same version.

Dead by Daylight is the outlier and the one to check the price on directly rather than through Amazon: four survivors against one player-controlled killer, full crossplay, and it needs exactly five people to be at its best.

Getting the two consoles talking

The pairing has one wrinkle the others do not: neither platform's friends list reaches the other, so the connection is made inside the game rather than at the system level. In practice that means each of these games has its own account system - an Epic account for Fortnite and Rocket League, a Microsoft account for Minecraft, an in-game code or lobby for the rest - and that account is what your friend adds, not your gamertag or your Nintendo friend code.

Two things to check before the first session. Crossplay is sometimes off by default and lives in a settings menu rather than being automatic. And Nintendo Switch Online is required for most online play on the Switch side, while Xbox's equivalent subscription is required for paid online games but not for free-to-play ones - which is another reason the free tier is so useful for this pairing. Our crossplay setup guide walks through the settings on each platform, and free vs paid multiplayer covers what the subscriptions actually cost a group.

If a third person joins on something else

Most of the picks above crossplay with everything, not just these two machines, so a friend on a PS5, a PC or a phone can usually be folded in without changing the game. The combinations are broken out separately if you want the shortlist for a specific pair: Switch and PC, Switch and PS5, PC and Xbox, and Xbox and PS5. For a phone-only friend, the phone and console page is the one that matters.

The honest summary

A Switch and an Xbox is a better pairing than it looks, but only if you accept the trade: you get Minecraft, the free crossplay tier, and the cheap party co-op catalog, and you give up everything Nintendo makes. Groups that fight that trade have a bad time. Groups that accept it play together three times a week for the price of one game.

The wider list of everything that bridges platforms is on our crossplay hub, and if the Switch player is the one who is usually left out, our Switch picks and Xbox picks pages show what each machine does best on its own.