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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

The Xbox app is a masterclass in how not to design a user interface, it is clunky, the menus don't go anywhere, they mixed terminology (some places have "Add friend" others have "Follow friend"), users with multiple screens will find their game launching on the non-principal one, language is tied to the OS so if you want your games in English but your Windows is in French you have to change the OS-level language.

I don't work at Microsoft, but if I had to guess there are several teams working on individual components and they lack a clear leader that enforce a global vision so it falls apart at integration time.

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It’s awful. A lot of basic stuff is just missing.

I had an Xbox game pass trial. When it expired it closed the game I was playing. No message. When I tried to reopen the game nothing happened. None of my games worked. But most importantly, it never told me why. Nowhere in the interface does it communicate “your trial ended” or “hey resubscribe to game pass” or “you can’t play games anymore” instead everything just stops working with no explanation. I was midway through contacting support when I pieced together that maybe the trial ended, and confirmed that on their website. That information isn’t available in the desktop app.

(This was over a year ago, hopefully it’s fixed now?)

Probably not. I was waiting for my gamepass subscription to expire last week so I could renew using the Xbox Live Gold upgrade. I was constantly notified that my subscription was expiring soon, but never actually got a notice when it actually expired. All of my games still looked playable until I tried actually playing them.

Also when you try to launch a game that was removed from gamepass you will get wonderful exception 0x00whatever instead of actual reason.

It's just so bad. When games install and you can actually play, which is a miracle, adding friends is like navigating a maze. I think we spent 20 minutes last time trying to get each other to show up and finding what you have to press/accept to actually befriend someone.

Not to mention that it basically kills modding if you don't also want to crack the game yourself/get a pre-cracked version from somewhere.

All day long most of us are interacting with products from brands that we like while oblivious to the fact that these brands are owned by ones we make fun of or even despise. I don’t thing anyone gets this big without realizing your shareholders prefer dividends over you stoking your ego by making sure everyone knows the money is going in your pocket, even if that means less money comes in.

I don’t think I’ve had Hennessy ever in my life, but they own my favorite Scotch and some friends’ favorite scotch. They don’t go bragging about it, they just collect the checks.

Forgetting that Bethesda is owned by Microsoft is easier to do if it’s not on XBox.

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