Xbox (Beta) store on PC starts adding mod support for games, includes design tweaks

I downloaded this app on my PC lastnight, as was pleasantly surprised to see that it seems to be almost the exact same user interface that is coming to Xbox consoles. This is literally like having an Xbox console on your PC. This is great for Playstation and Nintendo fans who do actually own a gaming PC, and want to be able to have access, not only to Xbox games, but also to the Xbox console experience, all without paying for a yearly subscription to play games online. Bravo Microsoft!

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timotim1193d ago

The new Xbox Beta App and Gamebar on Windows 10 are both really good and go a long way to making it feel like Xbox on your PC.

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Hayter4561193d ago

Microsoft embracing the PC market and building their ecosystem with Game pass is working wonders. Wonder if more mod support will happen on Series X?

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RazzerRedux1193d ago

"Beyond the updates on the modding front, the Xbox (Beta) client is now fully built on React Native architecture."

Really? Now that is interesting. Smart though. Basically makes the app entirely cross platform for both Windows and mobile. Used to be Microsoft would create its own framework for everything but in recent years they have adopted tech from other companies like Facebook and Google. Visual Studio has templates for both React and Angular as well as other tech like docker containers. Think all this started to change when Ballmer left.

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rainslacker1193d ago

.net(for games) and UWP(in general) never really caught on the way they wanted it to. It made sense for them to adapt to what was popular, because it's the best way to promote content on their platform.

Overall though, MS has always been pretty good at supporting other platforms within their SDKs. Or at least, 3rd party often had libraries which made it pretty streamlined.

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RazzerRedux1193d ago

Not really. Not with web based tech. MS promoted web forms and then razor with MVC. This is web-based tech and not from MS own library.

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rainslacker1192d ago

I know. I'm saying that the stuff they did never really caught on. .Net was supposed to be an answer to Java, and was adapted pretty quickly to handle web based scripting languages, which is what I assume you mean by web forms.

But, even with all that stuff they wanted to gain, they still had to include the ability to adapt that other stuff pretty easily, because they wanted their own products to have relevance within the development community.

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RazzerRedux1192d ago

".Net was supposed to be an answer to Java, and was adapted pretty quickly to handle web based scripting languages, which is what I assume you mean by web forms."

Asp.Net Web Forms was the first web tech MS used with .Net. It was basically VB event driven forms translated into web. But everything the dev programmed, for the most part, was server side. Client side script was generated in the background and the dev had no control over it. All the forms data was stored in a huge data dump called "viewstate". This was the dominant web tech for .Net for years until Asp.Net MVC came along and is still supported by Microsoft today. Even with MVC, this was proprietary tech. It could use third party scripting more easily, but still required IIS on Windows Server. Not until Asp.Net Core came along did Microsoft fully embrace non-MS technologies in their web stack. These days, most of my projects are fully separated client and server side applications with restful APIs on the server and webpack minimized/optimized compiled client side which I can deploy nearly anywhere. This is the exact same approach MS is taking with the Xbox app.

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rainslacker1192d ago (Edited 1192d ago )

I kind of feel we're agreeing with one another on most of what we're saying, or at least I'm agreeing with you, but due to general experience, we're maybe referring to things with different terminologies.

I also think I wasn't really thinking about the server side apps and more the client side of things, so that makes your comments have a somewhat different connotation for what I first responded with.

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