Xbox is making an attempt to make it simpler to inform which video games you’re allowed to play

Scrolling by way of your Xbox sport library, it may be tough to inform which video games you possibly can truly play in the mean time — maybe you downloaded one thing from Recreation Go, nevertheless it’s now not on the service, or your pal came to visit to play a sport and took the disc it was on dwelling with them. Microsoft is at the moment testing an answer to this drawback, with badges that can warn you {that a} sport can’t be launched, in line with Xbox engineering lead Eden Marie.

In a Twitter thread, Marie explains that the function provides two badges on screens the place you see video games, just like the homescreen or sport library. In the event you can’t play a sport due to licensing points — say, it was taken off of Recreation Go, otherwise you’re at the moment not logged into the Xbox Reside account related to the sport — you’ll see an exclamation mark on its thumbnail. If you’ll want to insert a disc earlier than taking part in a sport, it’ll present an icon with a crossed-out disc. At present, the take a look at is for folks within the Xbox Alpha & Alpha Skip-Forward Insider teams, which Microsoft says are often “invite-only.”

It looks as if a helpful function, letting you understand at a look which video games in your library you possibly can truly play, serving to you keep away from the scenario the place you see a sport in your library and get excited to play it, solely to obtain a (probably less-than-helpful) error message.

When requested if the take a look at would make these error messages clearer or if the system would reply to one thing like an Xbox Reside outage that quickly makes video games unlaunchable, Marie mentioned that the staff will “proceed to attempt to enhance the error messages that seem when a sport fails to launch to be extra particular and clear.” She continued, saying that “just a few new error sorts are included with this take a look at, however others (like recognizing precisely {that a} sport has left Recreation Go) would require extra work in upcoming releases.”

What it means to “personal a sport” has gotten a bit extra sophisticated over the previous few years, so it’s good to see that console makers are beginning to handle a number of the confusion that gamers may face. Whereas it’d be good to see issues like buttons that allow you to simply take away content material you possibly can now not play out of your library, as one commenter instructed, Marie mentioned in a follow-up tweet that there’ll be different enhancements sooner or later and that the icons being examined are a “obligatory first step.”