Last week, I demonstrated the new Xbox PC app which ended up being uploaded prematurely to some users’ devices (including mine, apparently!) but, some of you were asking how it works on an Xbox Ally. The answer is: pretty damn great.
The Xbox PC app has improved leaps and bounds over the past couple of years as Microsoft turned its attention more seriously to Windows and PC gaming in general. Steam OS has been giving Microsoft a well-deserved kick up the backside both in the usability and performance space for gaming, and the competition has led to improvements for those in the Xbox ecosystem on PC, both via Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox / PC Game Pass.
The Xbox PC app is undergoing a big revamp later this year, and here’s a video detailing a very early build you can expect to see (in a far more polished form) in the coming weeks.
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The primary gain here is raw performance. The Xbox Ally paired with the Xbox PC app offers very middling navigational responsiveness, with this weird “rubber banding” quirk where the cursor gets stuck, and you have to wait for it to become unstuck for a couple of seconds. If you get frustrated and spam buttons, as I often do, the inputs will queue up and then all play out instantly, leading to the highlighted object flipping all over the place.
In the new Xbox PC app, the rubber banding is completely gone I’m happy to report, even on this early build. Navigating through even massive lists of games is smooth and pleasant, and the loading speed is vastly improved across every panel. Whether it’s your own library, the Xbox Game Pass library, the store page, individual game pages, and beyond. Navigation also now feels a lot more “d-pad” native. On the existing app, sometimes the cursor moves in a diagonal direction unexpectedly, adding to the sense that it isn’t truly native for console-style use.
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The new Xbox PC app doesn’t offer much by way of new features yet, but I am told that there are plans to add new stuff before it all goes live. Indeed, this is an early, unfinished build as mentioned, and some of the things I saw people dislike from the video I put out last week have already been addressed on internal builds I’m told.
It’s unclear exactly when this will ship. I’m expecting it to go out to Xbox Insiders on PC at least towards the end of the year, by which time it should be a lot more polished and refined over what I’ve been messing around with now. It’s unclear if the Xbox Game Bar guide will get similar treatment, but I would hope so, since now it has a very different visual style to the Xbox PC app itself.
Xbox is getting serious about PC gaming
I would like to see more customization, with custom backgrounds to give us a greater sense of “ownership” in our increasingly-digital investment in the hobby. I’d like to see more data surface more quickly when navigating the store too. I shouldn’t have to enter a store page to see screenshots of a game or try to figure out what it is from its thumbnail in my view. Also, I think Xbox could still improve the search tool a bit, although some of this is on the developer’s side with regards to tagging their games properly and so on.
For sure, some of Xbox’s issues on PC move beyond the app itself, and emerge on the developer ecosystem side. Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon for example shipped with two builds simultaneously when it hit Xbox Play Anywhere a couple of weeks ago, allowing users to download the Xbox console version to their PC (which naturally wouldn’t run). It’s small issues like this which simply shouldn’t be possible, and wouldn’t be possible on Steam. Xbox needs to look towards fixing a litany of small things with its PC gaming ecosystem overall, and address things like native modding ecosystem support, systems for developer interactions with the community, social features potentially, and beyond. Perhaps the new Xbox Labs team will have some interesting things for Xbox PC up its sleeve in the future too.
In any case, it’s great to see Microsoft double down on all of its endpoints. Xbox console has had a ton of new features lately, with Mythic Achievements, 1440p remote play streaming, and voice clipping in the Game DVR. Xbox Cloud Gaming is also getting a new interface that looks very close to the new PC app, and we should be seeing a new Xbox Elite Series 3 controller emerge soon.
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