Fast-forward to today, and it’s a widely used app among PC gaming storefronts, sitting beside Steam, the Epic Games Store,, EA Desktop (formerly Origin) and Ubisoft Connect (formerly Uplay). It wasn’t really until Game Pass for PC (now known as PC Game Pass) came out in 2019, two years after Xbox Game Pass for Xbox consoles, that the Xbox PC app started to be used widely. It was rocky, not all that reliable, and certainly not worth gravitating to if you already used Steam. When the Windows 10 version came out, it became a marketplace for PC games and LAN streaming from your Xbox One (the app was simply renamed to Xbox). Before this time, it was called Xbox SmartGlass and didn’t really serve a big function. The Xbox app, as we know it, was added to Windows PCs with Windows 10 back in 2015, as an optional, downloadable application. How did Microsoft pull this off? How is the Windows Xbox app so riddled with problems? Seriously, I’ve used it across a few Windows PCs now, including my gaming PC (which runs Windows 10) and the Surface Laptop Studio, which I just reviewed (Windows 11), and on each device it’s a bit of a joke.Įven on a Microsoft-developed machine (the Surface) the app can’t get itself right - it’s buggy, it’s laggy, it has confusing discovery features, and sometimes it simply doesn’t work. It makes zero sense that it’s as anti-user as it is. Xbox Game Pass is terrific value for most gamers the Xbox Series S is a brilliant (and widely available) budget console and Xbox’s commitment to accessibility has been very impressive, stemming from hardware to first-party games.īut I can’t believe the Xbox app is still having major problems, five months after Windows 11’s launch and almost three years since the launch of Xbox Game Pass for PC. I love the focus Xbox has had in recent years.

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