Talking Point: What Improvements Would You Like To See Made To The Xbox Store?

1) When I open the Store, I often want to go first to my Wishlist. But if I open the left side tab right after the Store opens, the tab auto-closes. Happens 100% of the time.

2) There is currently no filter in search to look at BC games alone.

3) There is no filter to find FPS Boost/X Enhanced games either, or at least I can't find one.

They need to emphasize GAMES GAMES GAMES. Movies and TV need to play second fiddle here. It's not 2012 where I need a box to do everything, most smart TVs have their own apps you can download & streaming services dominate. I do occasionally rent a movie but that's super rare. Searchability is difficult and it's hard to find great indie titles or classics. Nobody really does searchability well.

@TheLastHarbinger great suggestions. Shopping by era and making it feel more nostalgic would be great. Also some Xbox Live Arcade style section would be amazing.

Give me back my wishlist. Show the Game Pass discounts even if I'm not subbed.

@TheLastHarbinger Wasn't there a news article yesterday about how the wishlist is coming front and center to either the Xbox home page or the store home page? You may have gotten your wish

One thing I think is really cool that they do is in the deals section, the wishlist deals row. That's a neat feature, saves time.

It's infinitely more responsive and quicker than both PS and Nintendo stores and I LOVE that. To nitpick, sometimes the trailers play even if you have turned that setting off previously. My favourite addition is that when you select a game, you can see the other purchase options and the price of each, very important for games that have five different editions. You can also check what's included and what add-ons are available easily.

To check the deals, I either check my wish list or browse the Special Deals pressing the X button, that shows them all. There are also Deals with Game Pass (15 or so) and Deals for You, that are useless, in my experience. Wish List is the way to go for weekly checks.

How's about keeping the store, on the store. NOT on the main dashboard screen. Remove 99% of the dashboard ads asap and I will be 100% less annoyed with the level of stupid ads on the system.

In no particular order, just some ideas from the top of my head;

> The Coming Soon games tab should list all upcoming games, but currently only lists games that are actually available for preorder - so the list is incomplete as not all games allow preorders before launch. It would be useful to see the complete list of upcoming releases and be able to add to your wishlist. This is how the Coming Soon tab on the Nintendo eShop works; it lists everything in one place even if it can’t be purchased yet. Xbox should copy that.

> Dynamic game bundles. Let’s use Crysis Remastered Trilogy as an example. If you buy this Trilogy on Steam but already own Crysis Remastered, Steam will know this and automatically discount the price of the content that you already own from the bundle and only charge you for the additional content you don’t yet own. Xbox is not smart enough to do this, it’ll charge you for the whole thing even if you already own the original game. Same story for complete/ultimate/GOTY editions if you already own the base version of the game and/or a DLC or two. You will always get double charged on Xbox, but Steam is smart enough to avoid that. So just copy Steam in this regard.

> We should have an option to reorder our wishlist in a custom order of priority. Steam has allowed this since the dawn of time. It’s very helpful to organise longer wishlists and decide which games are the most desired, which are lower priority, and group sequels together so it’s easier to read the list at a glance.

> Stop silo-ing user reviews/ratings by country. I can’t view reviews from US users when my console is set to UK for example, but this massively restricts the number of reviews for each game. So more niche indie games suffer from lack of reviews in these smaller countries and the ratings can be skewed because of the smaller sample size. Also introduce an algorithm that can surface the most helpful reviews first as Steam has just implemented, while still giving the user the option to sort by date of course.

> I think the sorting/filter options could be improved. Steam lets users add custom tags to games to allow for more specific genre categories or descriptors such as soulslike, 3D platformer, walking simulator, anime, cats, female protagonist, story rich, difficult etc. Obviously needs to be moderated somewhat to prevent abuse and trolling, but just copy Steam as they have it already figured out.

TLDR: just copy Steam.

The ability to sort the games by %off. I’m building frustration the longer I have to scroll through the 700+ titles ….

All of my desires relate to the Wish List:

1) It should be visible on the Store home page. Currently I have to open the side panel, scroll down to Lists, then select it
2) Allow me to sort it by price or alphabetically, ascending or descending.
3) Any games with a discount need to be highlighted, or forced to the top of the list
4) The price for all games should be visible at a glance. I don't want to see "Included with Game Pass".

They could improve it a bit more to be honest and definitely sort out some of the reviews left on games lots of racist and sexist comments

Get rid of the reviews for Game Pass games or require a minimum play-time or a purchase before allowing them. That would hopefully get rid of the idiot toddlers telling us that a game they haven’t played is ‘woke DEI trash’.

I want it so if a bundle is discounted but you own part of the bundle, the price is reduced acordigly. The quest store works like this and it's great. I really hate being punished for actually owning content already.

I'm sure discovery could be improved, as it always needs improving

Let me hide the titles i already own and sort by price option as well

I would just like the videos to play - they either don't play or stop after a few seconds - both in the store & in the game card
Happens on all my Xbox consoles Series & One
Can't just be me surely?

Often, when I'm browsing the store, I tend to forget about Game Pass, and I'm never sure when I'm looking at a game if I have to buy it or if I can play it and hundreds of other games on Game Pass. It might help if they could put more information up reminding people that Game Pass exists and that you can play games on Game Pass, or that a game is available on Game Pass or can be played instantly on the cloud with Game Pass.

Seriously though the only thing I think the store really needs is to bring back the feature they took away when series luanched which is being able to shop in the mobile app. PS lets me shop in the mobile app. Steam lets me shop in the mobile app. Other 3rd parties let me shop in the mobile app. Nintendo...well they're Nintendo. Xbox let you shop in the mobile app first, and then mysteriously disposed of it right when PS finally started supporting it.

Also, the Windows Store on PC. It needs games. Seriously, just, like any games. At all. Why does it have no games?

Just one, replace it with Steam

The search function is bad. You search, look at something, try to go back to the search results, and it just takes you back further to an empty search window.

The screen real estate is also used poorly.

There are a lot of good things about it too tho…

@NEStalgia yeah what the heck. Their mobile app is kind of terrible. It doesn’t even mirror the store. Their website is kind of a mess too. They need to unify the three. It’s silly.

There are a few things that I have mentioned from time to time that I would like to see happen with the Store:

1. If I own the Ultimate Edition of a game, why bother showing me the Deluxe or Standard versions when they are on sale? Fair enough to show me the Ultimate Edition if I own the Deluxe or Standard, as I may wish to upgrade it, but in reality there should be the capability to hide all games that you already own.

2. I get bored of scrolling through the same games every single week. So, please allow me to sort games into most recently added so that when there are 500 games on sale, I can look at just those that have been added this week, rather than those that were there last week, the week before that, and the week before that! It's a function that is available elsewhere, so surely it cannot be that difficult to implement it in the Xbox Store.

3. Please give me the ability to mark and hide any game that does not interest me. So when Golem turns up next time, allow me to hide it, and then I will never see the game again, no matter how often it goes on sale. I'm using Golem as an example, but there are literally thousands of games that I have no desire to buy, and many of them end up on sale week in week out. Allow me to hide them, and then that 500 games on sale will probably end up being closer to 20...! Obviously, the function to look through those games that you have previously hidden should be available, just in case you have a change of mind.

4. Handle reviews much like Steam whereby you have an overall score (say 70% positive reviews), and then have a separate score for the past month (or 3). As an example, the Cyberpunk we have now is in a very different state to when it first released, so where it would have had 50% recommending it back then, now it would likely be 90%+, meaning the more recent reviews scores are a far more accurate representation than it's earlier review scores combined with its more recent scores, which would likely put it at something like 70% of people recommending it.

Those are the main things I'd like to see changed, and it baffles me why Microsoft don't get the Store into a far better state than it is right now, as these issues have been about for many years...

Be able to filter games. So DLC from actual games, as for example I don't wish to be spammed with Sims 4 pack nonsense.

Filter/sort films and series by decade and genre.

I could think of more if Microsoft paid me to 🤣

Needs improved filters and a much better search engine.
At the very least to be able to search by publisher or developer.
This is a great feature on the nintendo eshop.

Price /genre/sale filtering etc all need improving.
I have mentioned these points before and nothing has changed.

@NEStalgia Yeah, Satya has a more robust collection of promises on IA than the total quantity of games that are available on the Windows Store on PC, which is dishearteningly disappointing.

We have talked previously about this, and I may sound like a broken record, but that Play Anywhere feature could have been a killer one. Pay for a game on the Xbox/Windows Store and play it across Xbox and PC. But most games released on Xbox aren't even on the Windows Store! Shame that nobody (publishers and even MS and/or Xbox itself) wanted to support this program.

By the way, on topic, it may be nice if the Xbox Store would display which games support the Play Anywhere in a clearer manner (I think some games that have the feature sometimes aren't tagged as such, but I haven't checked the store in a while). But given that nobody cares about Play Anywhere...

Being able to search by Developer and Publisher names would be nice. Maybe it's just me, but I'd also like an option to disable anything with a basic Game Pass price cut from showing up in the Deals section. I'd prefer to see things that, you know, are actual deals on a timer.

@HarmanSmith TBF Satya has a more robust collection of promises on AI than number of Windows licenses sold since 1990.

Yeah, I honestly don't know how they're pushing so hard on PC while running a store that makes EA Origin look like the future. How does one launch a PC gaming store that's missing most games?! It's the default pack-in store in Windows. You'd think it would be robust. Instead it's a vacuum. Hard to take the store seriously unless playing a game you already bought on XB and it happens to be on there.

I suspect the list of Play Anywhere titles is shorter than the list of BC titles. Which is sad. I have a huge XB library and my automatic PC library is barely one page from that.

I know it's an unavoidable field due to developers' requests, but the Xbox 360 store was much easier to understand when full games, XBLA, and indie games were separated.

Get rid of the Store app updates and just do them in the background - they're annoying. More Steam functionality like user curated lists because I would like to know which DEI products to avoid.