Xbox on PC is (less of) a Joke

 

UPDATE 2026/07: Microsoft has made important improvements to the Xbox app on PC, some barriers remain.

No, this is not trolling Xbox fans. I myself was an Xbox original enthusiast - it is still one of my favorite consoles, head and shoulders above the PS2 in everything but library depth.

I even had a 360, even though that already started a trend of... trend chasing the Wii that now is going into handhelds or AI. But it was still a good console with good games.
What let it down was the software issues with even the last dashboard update making things much worse and adding "avatars" no one asked for.

So, today I wanted to discuss why you should try but not seriously consider Xbox on PC. It is a joke. 

It seems no one is doing their job and are just trying to make things as they go. Why? What is one of the most important questions of a PC gamer? It is "Can I run this game?".

Xbox, incredibly does not have PC requirements information. Not, I'm not kidding. In 2026, Microsoft expects you wait for a 100GB game to download before you know if it runs or not. Have a look:

It says if you can run on which consoles, cloud or what type of device. This is the online page but the Xbox app is the same. There is no information.

You cannot do better than Steam if you don't do the... minimum requirements to serve PC gamers.

Every Steam game has this information, even if some are outdated you still know your newer machine should do ok.

Instead, Microsoft is wasting time with AI chat bot slop:

Yes, AI LLM thing bot, what I need to know is minimum requirements for Xbox consoles. No, it does not understand sarcasm or has been trained on anything else than Xbox website, it seems.

So, while I would like the Xbox app to be good and it has been improving this is still missing.

Besides the main problem on this post, other features need improvement:

1. Downloads do not stop computer from suspending. Downloading a 100GB game may mean manually waking it up if you have short of a Gigabit connection (or are using WiFi).
2. Cannot move installed games between drives.
3. Cannot use controllers other than Xbox compatible ones (360, One, Series).
4. Xbox pad works on login screen, does not let you unlock (Working with Xbox One gamepad or later)
5. Requires to have the main install folder on C drive.
6. Xbox Studios games do not have native ARM64 versions. This would be important given Nvidia is coming on board soon.

Some of these are less critical but especially 1. and 2. are rather important given game sizes lately. They are also usually fixes that don't require a lot of work.

The ARM64 support I think should be there given that market is growing. The app itself runs with no problem but x86 emulation takes a bit of a hit on performance. Most of the software now has ports for Windows On ARM, games are still very much at the starting line.

I'll keep revisiting this page if  as it improves.