Microsoft plans to beef up Xbox Clubs with Discord-like features

One of my biggest pet peeves with Xbox is how clunky its Windows 10 app is. It's functional for party chat, accessing your Game DVR, and things of that nature, but it'southward painfully slow, specially then for text-based communication, which is dominating gaming right now. Steam chat, Discord, and various other services are simply far faster than the Xbox app when it comes to sending messages at any sort of scale.

In a recent Q&A session at E3, Phil Spencer touched on the topic, noting that progress on the Xbox app has slowed down, due in office to Microsoft rethinking how it approaches PC gaming. Spencer said that rather than bring console-like features to PC, it will focus on bringing PC gamers playing Xbox games on their computers features that emulate what's already out at that place, such every bit Steam and Discord.

We got a glimpse of at least some concepts Microsoft is working on to achieve this goal, starting with changes to Game Hubs and Xbox Clubs.

Official Clubs

Microsoft is exploring ditching Game Hubs entirely, replacing them with what they're referring to internally every bit "Official Clubs." Official Clubs will office similarly to Clubs, but they will be owned past the publisher or developer of the games they are attached to and will come with robust features to help developers engage with their customers over Xbox Alive.

If Microsoft moves ahead with this program, Official Clubs would get links wherever they're contextually relevant, such as a Microsoft Shop folio or within the Xbox Guide menu.

Microsoft's documents say the Official Clubs will come with moderation tools similar to what's available today, with features such as locking comments down on a thread, allowing community managers to add together scheduled posts, and robust engagement analytics.

Discord-like Clubs channels

Microsoft is working on Discord-like channels for its Clubs system, which look as though they will allow users to customize dissimilar types of content feeds, chat channels, and also voice-chat channels, dubbed "parties."

You lot will too exist able to pivot Mixer channels to your Order, making it piece of cake for your friends (or customers, if y'all're a publisher) to discover your content.

A stride in the right management

Microsoft has an opportunity to create deeper integration between its gaming systems and its social systems, some of which have been dramatically underserved in recent years. Discord has get the go-to tool for building gaming communities about everywhere, and the explosive growth shines a spotlight on only how boring innovation has been at both Xbox and Skype with regards to communication for gamers. Thankfully, information technology looks similar Microsoft is putting more than investment into Xbox to take control of some of these features and get them to where they need to be.

As always, plans such equally they can and ofttimes do change, but Microsoft is at to the lowest degree exploring building on Clubs and its Xbox app, and hopefully, we'll meet the fruits of that exploration sooner than later.

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