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Windows Central -Xbox feedback analysis: The top issues Xbox fans want to see fixed in 2022

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman

jez-xbox-feedback-2022.jpg


As good as Xbox has been doing lately, things could always be better, right? Recently, I asked on Twitter what Xbox fans' biggest concerns were currently about the Xbox platform, and solicited over 1,000 replies with user feedback. Over the Christmas break, I sat down and analyzed each bit of feedback based on various categories. If a feedback item appeared only once, I added it to an "other" column. The vast majority of complaints did, in fact, appear multiple times, and the range of feedback was quite broad.

Here's an overview (and wholly unscientific) look at the ~1,000 user feedback sample I gathered, and what seem to be some of the biggest trending issues among core Xbox fans.

Xbox feedback overview


On Dec. 28, I asked Xbox fans in my Twitter following for feedback on the current state of Xbox. Each time I tracked an issue from an individual user, I added it to a tally on Excel and produced the above pie chart based on the results.

No single issue wholly dominated for Xbox gamers.

This should by no means be taken as scientific, given that it focuses entirely on my personal Twitter following and disregards the experiences of users who are perhaps playing more casually and don't get involved in the online discourse. Still, it gives us some good indication at what the prevailing pain points are for heavy Xbox users, and may give us some idea of where Xbox may prioritize development for future features and expenditure.

As you can see above, no single issue wholly dominated for Xbox gamers. The biggest pain points for most pertain to the Xbox Game DVR, which records game captures, screenshots, and handles live streaming. Another big pain point was general issues with the Xbox OS, with many complaints about the abundance of "ads" on the dashboard. Another concern for Xbox gamers is the perception of decreased support from Japanese studios, who increasingly seem to bypass Xbox in favor of exclusivity deals with Sony PlayStation or Nintendo Switch.

Below I'll offer some more details on the complaints, and also we'll start to track where Microsoft is on some of these issues over the course of the next year.

Xbox game DVR


There were many, many complaints about various aspects of the Xbox Game DVR, and for good reason. The Xbox Game DVR has fallen into a bit of a state in recent years, in a variety of ways. The way the system handles HDR for captures is a bit off, with screenshots appearing washed out and weird when you upload them to a PC. It's also weirdly difficult to obtain your captures from a PC, with no system in place currently to access cloud files without manually uploading them from your Xbox to an adjacent service like OneDrive.

Another complaint I combined in this category revolves around streaming. Since the death of Mixer, Microsoft had no way to stream directly from the Xbox to streaming platforms until recently, when it finally re-integrated Twitch. However, Twitch isn't the only streaming service out there. The Xbox currently offers no native support for YouTube Gaming, for example.

The Xbox Game DVR also has no system for editing clips together, offering only a basic trimming service. In a social media world, it seems odd that the Xbox Game DVR is so bare-bones when it comes to some of this stuff. The old "Upload Studio" app was left abandoned and finally deleted entirely from Xbox a little while ago.

Thankfully, Xbox engineering lead Jason Ronald said on a podcast a little while ago that the Xbox Game DVR is a high priority for the team in 2022, so hopefully, we'll see these issues solved sooner, rather than later.

Xbox OS customization and improvements


For this, I lumped many complaints about the Xbox dashboard into a single category, since there were many issues that were a little less specific. The most prevailing complaint revolved around the abundance of tiles perceived as "ads" on the dashboard. The larger tiles across the bottom generate "recommended" content from various sources, including achievements, game recommendations, and so on. Many users seek the ability to hide this row of panels and desire a "cleaner" dashboard that showcases more of the background.

There were other complaints, ranging from the lack of HDR on the dashboard which causes flickering on some TVs while switching HDR modes. Also, general speed of the dashboard often came up as an issue, too. There were some complaints about the complexity of the Family Settings system, too, while others requested Discord integration for messaging and voice chat.

Support from Japanese studios


Another frequent concern revolved around support from Japanese and other third-party studios.

With Sony buying up exclusivity deals around the Final Fantasy franchise, and other franchises like Persona just arbitrarily ignoring Xbox all together, it's clear that many Xbox fans feel Microsoft needs to work harder to get some of these developers interested in building for the platform.

Xbox has seen a bit of success here and there from Japanese studios. Microsoft helped bring Phantasy Star Online 2 to the West via Xbox, for example, and Sega also brought the entire Yakuza franchise to Xbox, after years of exclusivity on other platforms. Microsoft has even garnered some wins from Square Enix, nabbing Octopath Traveler for Xbox Game Pass. Yet still, major gaps in the lineup persist. While not Japanese-made, Genshin Impact skipping Xbox has proven a pain point for some, and Atlus' continued absence on Xbox frustrates JRPG fans everywhere.

Microsoft has previously described Japan as one of its fastest-growing markets, so perhaps the situation will change in the coming years. But it's clear Xbox still has a lot of work to do in this area.

Xbox achievements


Another large bout of feedback fell against the Xbox achievement system, which has been a bit neglected in recent years. Save for the inclusion of a special "rare achievement" toast notification, there have not been any meaningful additions to the system in years. Meanwhile, PlayStation's Trophy system has become the object of some jealousy, given that it offers a more granular look at how players tackle achievement hunting.

Many players were asking for some sort of recognition for 100% completions of games, while others want to be acknowledged for their dedication to a single title. It's certainly true that professional gamers may spend more time in a single game learning to play at a higher level, rather than hunt down achievements in many separate games. Additionally, there were complaints about some indie publishers who deflate the quality of achievements with purposefully easy Gamerscore harvesting opportunities, devaluing the system as a whole.

Xbox first-party concerns


There continues to be concerns about Xbox's first-party output too, despite the acquisitions Microsoft has made in recent years. Many of these complaints were about different specific things with regards to first-party, ranging from requests to revive old IPs like Banjo, to the perceived lack of information about major upcoming games like State of Decay 3, Perfect Dark, Fable, and others.

It's clear that Microsoft still has some work to do to fully repair the perception that it can't meet Sony's PlayStation platform on raw quality. They've had a large range of positive wins last year, with more award nominations than any time in recent memory. Flight Simulator, Age of Empires IV, Forza Horizon 5, and Halo Infinite were all well received, and continue to bring people to the platform who may have never considered Xbox before. That being said, games like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, and others on PlayStation just seem to still be at a level of quality Xbox hasn't been able to reach yet, despite the variety that Microsoft is putting out.

Players in the thread continued to request high-quality cinematic third-person action games, akin to the likes of God of War and Horizon. There were also calls for Microsoft to explore superhero games, in response to Sony's confident command of the Spider-Man IP. Fixing this perception will take time, still, likely frustrated further by the pandemic and work-from-home disruption of the past two years. In 2022, some of the most anticipated Xbox games include Starfield and Redfall, as the purchase of ZeniMax starts to bear fruit for Xbox.

Other Xbox concerns


There were various other concerns that appeared frequently in the thread. Localization issues continue to be a subject of concern outside of U.S. and U.K. markets specifically, with many users upset at the lack of support for Microsoft Rewards in their region. As someone who uses Bing and Microsoft Edge across PC and mobile, it almost gets me enough points every few months to effectively pay for Xbox Game Pass for free. It's understandable that people would be mad about missing out on this, but unfortunately, it's not on the Xbox team to solve this one, since Microsoft Rewards is handled by a different part of the company. However, it also includes concerns such as poor language support for first-party games, with many games receiving no local dub in their language of choice, or in some cases, not even subtitles.

Many users were also requesting some sort of Xbox Game Pass family plan, for multi-console households. Right now, you can share Xbox Game Pass with up to one other user using the console-sharing workaround method, but for people with multiple kids and multiple Xboxes, those costs rack up quite quickly. Considering even Office 365 has a family plan, it seems a bit of an odd omission that Xbox Game Pass does not. Hopefully Microsoft and its partners can work this one out.

Xbox Game Pass


Many users were also bringing up forced crossplay between consoles and PC on games like Halo Infinite and Call of Duty, exposing Xbox gamers to hackers on PC and perceptions of unfair competitive play when you start mixing controllers with mouse and keyboard players. Many users also complained about the quality of the Xbox apps across mobile and PC, which have inconsistent features at best, and horribly bad performance at worst. The Xbox app on PC is particularly bad, and something we've written about extensively here on Windows Central.

Another issue that came up frequently was the quality of backward-compatible games on the Xbox Series S. On the Xbox Series X, backward-compatible games use their Xbox One X resolutions and frame rates, but even though the Xbox Series S should be capable enough to handle these higher resolutions in older games, the system downloads the Xbox One S versions of backward-compatible games by default. This may be a precaution to ensure smooth gameplay, but I'm sure Microsoft could explore workarounds to make these features a little better on the Xbox Series S, considering many users likely picked up the smaller console as a secondary platform to take advantage of backward compatibility.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
Wtf are game dvr problems. I’ve never used it in my life. give me games, give me Japanese games and yeah ok I’ll take constant improvements to the OS.

But yeah, just more and more great games releasing please….and tools….improve da tools! :)
 

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
Wtf are game dvr problems. I’ve never used it in my life. give me games, give me Japanese games and yeah ok I’ll take constant improvements to the OS.

But yeah, just more and more great games releasing please….and tools….improve da tools! :)
If you look to the PS5 and the complete video editor they have from the PS4 and see what have the Xbox... is the night and day.

Even when the Upload studio was active the difference was huge, imagine now without nothing.
 
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They are investing in it, through Hololens and other means.

They will put out a consumer version when the time is right. Just because they don't have a publicly facing product doesn't mean they aren't investing time and money into it.
I don't think we will ever see a (payable) gamer version. Microsoft is much more than Xbox and everything they are doing in that direction is for military and industrial purposes. They don't even have to, they could just make a deal with Quest and don't have to invest much money.
 
I just remembered the Dual Sense. According to the internet haptic feedback and adaptive triggers are game changers, but didn't even make it to the list while VR did.

1.000 people is just not enough, Ed Boon schould make another Survey, at least he reached 50k people.
 

Robb

Gold Member
Is there any previous version of this? Would be interesting to see if the “first party” percentage has decreased or not.

I would have thought OS problems would be the biggest one (mainly due to some inconsistencies with quick resume etc.) followed by Japanese games support.
 

Kagey K

Banned
I just remembered the Dual Sense. According to the internet haptic feedback and adaptive triggers are game changers, but didn't even make it to the list while VR did.

1.000 people is just not enough, Ed Boon schould make another Survey, at least he reached 50k people.
Let's be honest, the makes no difference. People like it for a second and shut it off.

It doesn't change the game in any meaningful way

Same with HD rumble in Joycons.
 
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Kagey K

Banned
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I picked low hanging fruit. There's a lot more than that.

You said Noone does it, I proved you wrong, and you have nothing more to offer.

You asked for data that people do it, I showed it to you.
Of course they can do it it's literally an option in the menus, genius.

You don't have data that majority or a great deal of PS5 users turn of the haptics and adaptive triggers.

You're full of shit.
 

Kagey K

Banned
Of course they can do it it's literally an option in the menus, genius.

You don't have data that majority or a great deal of PS5 users turn of the haptics and adaptive triggers.

You're full of shit.
Prove it.

I did.

If people didn't want to shut it off there wouldn't be 1000 art8cles about how to do it.
 
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cireza

Banned
Not sure how they can stop Sony from buying exclusivity for every Japanese game under the sun, but they could have a couple exclusive projects specifically funded for Xbox.
 
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Cherrypepsi

Member
GameDVR -> App -> Xbox OS for me in that order.

The GameDVR is total crap. Audio is completely out of sync for clips recorded from 120hz gameplay. They got rid of the crappy editing app and replaced it with... nothing. Series X lets you record a max of 3 minutes where One X let you record 5? A neglected feature that has only gotten worse over time. Embarrassing.

The app (on Windows) has always been kind of crap. The old Xbox Companion was better than the new one. Neither one reliably delivers messages. They actually gutted the old one's ability to send and receive messages... but I still keep it around since it's better for Party Chat. Which I only need because they took away the optical port on the new Xboxes.... which leads me to my other big complaint: I have to use a second account on PC and connect to parties with both accounts, because I have no way of getting decent quality audio out of my Xbox to my Soundblaster X7 without adding another device to extract the HDMI audio (and hopefully not fucking up my 120hz or anything else along those lines).... so okay I connect with another account on my PC but literally everytime I start it up there is a fucking alert about how it's not using my store account. Yeah I fucking know. I don't care. Why do I have to dismiss it every time I open the app? And that's not just once per boot, I need to completely restart the app to check for new messages. Because new messages won't pop semi-reliably otherwise. I've had times where I've messaged my friend about playing a game since I see them online, and they don't respond and I move on with my life... then hours or days later I get a response they had actually sent within minutes. I have to try to drag Xbox people onto Discord just so I can communicate with them.

It also doesn't reliably display people's online status. I can be in a fucking party with someone in the app, and they still aren't showing online in the app. But will show online on the console... Or vice versa. And no they don't have the "show offline" feature going. Another complete embarrassment.

And then the OS... okay I get that quick resume is a useful feature for some. For me it just actively gets in the way. Every time I go back to R6 I need to start loading the app, then force kill it, then start loading it again. It doesn't reconnect to the servers otherwise. Why the fuck can't I disable quick resume? Games aren't that fucking great. They have memory leaks, or other problems that build over time. I'm almost exclusively on multiplayer games that won't let me 'quick resume' anything useful... at best it's a push if the game kicks me back to the menu in a timely fashion. So just let me clean boot my game whenever I play. Aside from that the Party Chat isn't great... joining friends from the OS still isn't consistent despite it being the same basic interface from like XBO launch 8+ years ago....

I give zero fucks about weeb games, fanboy-war (i.e. first party) games, or achievements (which is funny because in the 360 era I loved achievements).
 

Chukhopops

Member
Wtf are game dvr problems. I’ve never used it in my life. give me games, give me Japanese games and yeah ok I’ll take constant improvements to the OS.

But yeah, just more and more great games releasing please….and tools….improve da tools! :)
Yeah I fully agree, I take screenshots sometimes but that’s it. Would definitely take OS improvements over it.

Also VR is definitely not a priority it seems. Haptics not even in the survey makes sense to me too.
 

Rivet

Member
VR at 2% yet we have a thread here crying about Xbox having no VR.

Don't let the poll fool you, it's just they mostly don't know about it. Quest 2 sold 10 million in a single year. VR gaming is coming fast, I can see it taking off live. I'm having a blast playing VR coop and there are tons of great games now. There's even a MMO releasing in a few days.

MS is falling behind, they need to move right now.
 
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sinnergy

Member
Don't let the poll fool you, it's just they mostly don't know about it. Quest 2 sold 10 million in a single year. VR gaming is coming fast, I can see it taking off live. I'm having a blast playing VR coop and there are tons of great games now.

MS is falling behind, they need to move right now.They

The only move they need to make is support 3rd party headsets , series is basic my a pc, enable Valve and the best sellers .. done. Could be easy for MS, headsets can be both used in PC and series . Pretty good offer if they do it like this .
 
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Rivet

Member
The only move they need to make is support 3rd party headsets , series is basic my a pc, enable Valve and the best sellers .. done. Could be easy for MS, headsets can be both used in PC and series . Pretty good offer if they do it like this .

I don't know, Meta is pulling away quickly. Everything bought on Oculus Store means Meta is getting the sales 30 %, nobody else.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
Don't let the poll fool you, it's just they mostly don't know about it. Quest 2 sold 10 million in a single year. VR gaming is coming fast, I can see it taking off live. I'm having a blast playing VR coop and there are tons of great games now. There's even a MMO releasing in a few days.

MS is falling behind, they need to move right now.

a stand-alone vr headset at 300 pounds and cheaper on sale is doing well. A headset that doesn’t require any other hardware. It’s not a good gauge that all headsets will do well or we would have seen it already.
 
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RPS37

Member
Accessories issues only 4%?
Must not have encountered the gift and curse of the elite series 2.
 

Rivet

Member
a stand-alone vr headset at 300 pounds and cheaper on sale is doing well. A headset that doesn’t require any other hardware. It’s not a good gauge that all headsets will do well or we would have seen it already.

PSVR1 sold 5 million, and it was a 2016 wired device. All that people want is an affordable device and good content
 

Plantoid

Member
My only complaint is the lack of HDR in the dashboard, when doing quick resume it gets weird because of my tv changing modes

Couldn't care less about japanese games (except fromsoftware)
 

ZywyPL

Banned
All that people want is an affordable device and good content

100% this. But as of now neither is happening. Like I said in other thread recently, VR needs to come down to 99-149$ price rage just like motion controllers if it wants to mimic their success. The userbase will then skyrocket, and with it the platform will be flooded with content.
 

mejin

Member
My only complaint is the lack of HDR in the dashboard, when doing quick resume it gets weird because of my tv changing modes

Couldn't care less about japanese games (except fromsoftware)

At least one exclusive Sony will get It from them.
 
100% this. But as of now neither is happening. Like I said in other thread recently, VR needs to come down to 99-149$ price rage just like motion controllers if it wants to mimic their success. The userbase will then skyrocket, and with it the platform will be flooded with content.
Quest 2 is at Switch cost now. Many stores offered $50 gift cards with purchase over Christmas.
 
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