Scrolling through your Xbox game library, it can be hard to tell which games you can actually play right now — maybe you downloaded something from Game Pass, but it's no longer on the service. Microsoft is currently testing a solution to this problem, with badges that will warn you that a game can't be released, according to Xbox engineering lead Eden Marie.
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In a Twitter thread, Marie explains that the feature adds two badges to screens where you see games, like the home screen or game library. If you can’t play a game due to licensing issues — say, it’s been removed from Game Pass or you’re not signed in to the Xbox Live account associated with the game — you’ll see an exclamation mark on its thumbnail. If you need to insert a disc before playing a game, an icon with an ejected disc will appear. Currently, the test is for people in the Xbox Alpha & Alpha Skip-Ahead Insider groups, which Microsoft says are typically “invite-only.”
It seems like a useful feature, letting you know at a glance which games in your library you can actually play, helping you avoid the situation where you see a game in your library and get excited to play it, only to receive an error message.
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When asked if the test would make these error messages clearer, or if the system would respond to something like an Xbox Live outage that temporarily makes it impossible to launch games, Marie said that the team will “continue to work on improving the error messages that appear when a game fails to launch to be more specific and clear.” She continued, saying that “some new error types are included in this test, but others will require more work in upcoming releases.”
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What it means to “own a game” has gotten a little more complicated in recent years, so it’s nice that console makers are starting to address some of the confusion that gamers might face . While it would be nice to see things like buttons that let you easily remove content you can no longer play from your library, as one commenter mentioned, Marie said in a follow-up tweet that there will be other improvements in the future, and that the icons being tested are a “necessary first step.”
Source of information: theverge.com
