Microsoft Starts Rolling Out New Xbox Home Experience

The new Xbox Home experience that Microsoft has been testing with Insiders for a couple of weeks is now rolling out to all Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One users. The redesigned Home dashboard gives more room to personalized backgrounds, which is something that Xbox Insiders have been pretty vocal about.

Back in April, Microsoft pulled an experimental Xbox Home UI that most Xbox Insiders saw as too crowded. A month later, the Xbox team introduced a new experimental dashboard with smaller tiles, and this new Xbox Home UI is what the company is rolling out to all Xbox users today.

“When we first showed Xbox Insiders what we were working on we heard your feedback clearly – you wanted more room to show off custom backgrounds or game art, quicker navigation options, and more personalization. Over the last 8 months since initial release, we’ve implemented changes to meet those requests and have a new Home that feels fresh, puts the focus on your games and apps, and creates space for beautiful backgrounds,” the Xbox team said today.

While the new Xbox Home experience looks familiar, there’s a new quick access menu at the top with shortcuts to the game library, the Microsoft Store. There’s also a new option to dynamically change your background to match the game you’re highlighting in the recently played list.

When scrolling down, users will see curated lists of games, a row with updates from friends and games they follow, and Microsoft also added a new Watch & Listen section highlighting content available on entertainment apps. It’s still possible to customize what appears when scrolling down by pinning games, user-curated groups, and system groups like Quick Resume (on Xbox Series X|S).

This new Xbox Home experience will start rolling out to a subset of Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S consoles today. It should appear on all consoles over the coming weeks.

In addition to this new Xbox Home experience, the Microsoft Store on Xbox consoles is adding new payment options thanks to Microsoft’s expanded partnership with PayPal (via The Verge). Users in the US, UK, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy can now use PayPal’s Pay Later option to spread payments over time. In the US, the Microsoft Store also lets users pay with Venmo, which also lets users split payments upon purchase.