Microsoft Releases New Xbox Features on PCs and Consoles

Microsoft has released today the April update for the Xbox app on PC, which brings the new game hubs that the company has been testing since February to all users. For Xbox console players, the Xbox April Update is also bringing improvements to the Discord experience, game captures on OneDrive, and new acccess restrictions.

Let’s start with the updates for the Xbox app on PC, which is where Windows users can access PC Game Pass titles and the big PC games that developers now release on the Microsoft Store. This Xbox app now has game hubs where users can keep track of their progress, compare it to their friends’ data, as well as their own game captures.

“Any game clip or screenshots you’ve captured through Game Bar for a specific game will now be displayed in its respective game hub and locally stored on your PC. You can browse your captures in the app, copy them to the clipboard for easy sharing, or quickly jump to the file location,” explained Alex Charters, Senior Product Manager, Xbox Experiences.

The new game hubs also feature updates from developers as well as the latest content and add-ons for games. Microsoft also integrated data from HowLongToBeat to show estimates for how long it should take to complete a game.

With this latest update for the Xbox app on PC, a subset of users will also see new sub-navigation options under the “What’s Happening” section of the Game Pass tab. Here, Microsoft is adding new shortcuts to select titles from Xbox Game Studios, EA Play, and Riot Games that are available with PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

Moving on the April Update for Xbox consoles, this update improves the Discord integration by allowing users to hear soundboard audio from others in a Discord channel or call (this can be turned off in settings). Moreover, Xbox gamers who enabled the automatic upload of their game captures to OneDrive will now see notifications when their remaining cloud storage space is getting low.

Lastly, Microsoft is adding new access restrictions on Xbox consoles to prevent guest users from installing or uninstalling games and apps. These restrictions can be enabled with a “guest pin” that can be configured in Settings > System > Access restrictions. That’s it for the main changes in the Xbox April Update, which will start rolling out later today on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S consoles.