Got the 360 out of the loft and up and running, the UI took some remembering but I have got Tiger Woods 2014 coming today via the rainforest and also got Fifa Street which the kids love, definitely need an updated version of it for current gen consoles. All these rainbow flicks and panna (bad news when it takes your 7 year old son to explain it means a nutmeg) are totally relevant nowdays.
Seeing my youngest do a rainbow flick followed by a diving header in the goal was great he was grinning like you couldn’t believe.
The games seem to hold up pretty well, maybe that has more to do with me playing plenty of older games on the PC still and not being a graphic whore or maybe the step change at times is not as massive as we think for most games.
There was a recent change that helps with sales a bit. Go to Store (shoulder-button-tab over from Home or Xbox Button>Store) and then just below the six featured products at the top you’ll see an icon that says “Deals.” Select that and you’ll go straight to the page that lists all of the sales.
(This is a new addition in the last month or two.)
That’s awesome! I want back compat to be a huge success so Microsoft carries on the initiative. Has been one of my favorite console features this generation.
That’s a welcome change but it still feels like pre-2000 tech when trying to buy something. Compared to the PS4 store, it’s just ancient. I don’t get it.
Would very much love to know your specifics on areas you’d like to see improvement or where you feel like PS4 does it better, either here or in a PM. (I have my own wish list, of course, and there’s always plenty of stuff in the queue to improve the experience, but it’s always great to hear specific feedback.)
Not the original poster, but my two stream-of-consciousness cents: In particular, LET ME HAVE A CONSISTENT LINK TO WHAT IS ON SALE. Sometimes there is a link, sometimes there is nothing at all. Logged on yesterday because the big backwards compatibility sale was on, and there was no indication anywhere I looked on the Xbox store that it existed. I ended up going through the BC section of the store, clicking the interesting ones and seeing if the price was discounted. Pretty sure the list was not complete. Logged in today, hey now there’s a button but I bought stuff yesterday. Yep, the main BC list was definitely not complete. Oh wait, I see a little, non-colored “deals” button by my pic as long as I’m at the absolute top of a page. Not sure how many times I have specifically looked for such a thing and missed it. That’s design language that tells me you feel obligated to provide it, but don’t want it used much. I find the whole sale-buying process to be less than optimal, and I buy a lot of stuff.
Also, it would be nice to have a shopping cart rather than buying everything piecemeal (clearly the 360 stuff has tech issues behind its awkwardness, but I’m still impressed it’s there at all, so that gets a pass). And more sorting options and discoverability would be very nice. Like genre views or tags, new release spotlights (being first on a reverse chronological list is not a spotlight IMO), or a watch or wish list with email sale notifications (maybe even a notice on XB1 login?). Also, if I click on an item when I’m deep in a list, it is quite frustrating to not be put back where I was when I exit the item. Re-scrolling down is tedious and punishes the customer for being curious and exploring. That’s the sort of thing that Sony fixed between the awful PS3 store and the reasonably functional PS4 store.
Sorry, don’t mean to interrupt, but different topic:
OMG There’s a limited time trial of Minecraft Xbox One edition. I think it’s free this weekend. I’ve been waiting for a sale for the longest time, but this is a next best thing.
@Editer Coming from both the PlayStation and the Nintendo stores and Steam into the Xbox One environment as of this past Christmas, I think the things I’ve isolated above from @RickH are the most notable for me. I managed to get into the backwards compatibility sale page a little easier than him (I’ve learned to look for the “Deals” button) but once in there I knew I wanted Strania but given that was only $2.49, I might have bought a handful of other games to make it up to like $10. When I realized there was no cart, that didn’t happen. It literally stopped my purchase at the one item.
So how does this differ from the PlayStation store? Over there, in the last year or two, I’ve been buying up PSOne and PS2 Classics as they go on sale (on PS3) as well as some digital only titles on PS3 and PS4. When these sales happen, I usually fill my cart with a bunch of stuff until I get to like $10 to $20 and buy them all in one fell swoop. It’s really handy and it has nicely filled out my collection of games I was missing from those generations or that I wanted easy access to on a current console. I just can’t do that on the Xbox One store and I think it has been limiting.
The other thing he notes about not returning to the same place in the list is maddening, especially if you’re looking at the backwards compatibility sale specifically since it’s a rather large number of games. Between that and the lack of shopping cart, I got annoyed, only bought the one thing, and promptly decided I probably wasn’t even going to bother looking again.
Sony’s store has really improved over the years. Nintendo… there are plusses to how they do it and minuses too. I like that it’s so simple and they do a really good job categorizing things. On the other hand, they don’t advertise things well so I’m sure that hurts them a bit too. Stuff gets lost after it releases unless it’s on sale. They have a good wish list though which I’m not sure Sony even has at all?
Steam and GoG are probably the best of them all because it’s just so easy to buy things there.
I’m pretty sure shopping cart has been high priority on the store backlog for a while, but it hasn’t made the cut due to competing priorities and overall complexity.
One of the biggest thing happening in the store is finally bringing together all the digital stuff (Xbox/PC/web/etc.) with the physical product stuff (microsoftstore.com selling hardware and such).
Additionally, 360 back-compat games still go through some legacy infrastructure which is why the UI looks different when you buy a 360 game vs. Xbox One game, and it’s why you can’t use Microsoft Account credit to purchase back-compat games unless you do it directly on a 360.
So even a “simple” feature like a shopping cart would need to be able to pull together all of those different types of content into one place, enabling it all to be purchasable in the same way at the same time (360 back compat + xbox one game + PC game + surface device + whatever else).
I don’t work on that feature or know for sure, but I can imagine that’s the kind of complexity making the feature take a while.
It does sound like a complicated undertaking. Pass along my feedback if you can, because I do think that a shopping cart is the most basic of functionality that is sorely missing from the store right now.
Thanks Rick - that sums up my two main issues pretty well. The lack of a shopping cart is just bizarre and makes buying more than one thing extremely annoying. And the whole store interface is just incredibly confusing. It takes me longer than I’d care to admit just to find the free Gold games each month.
Just a couple of tips: The free Gold games are always linked from the Xbox Live Gold slot that’s always present on Home. And the rest of the sales, like back-compat, will always be linked from the Deals page, which can be reached from the Deals icon that’s always right below the big banner section on the Store page.
And seriously, thanks for the feedback, guys. I work on the store team nowadays and it’s really helpful. None of this is news – we all use the store and want these features too! – but it’s great to hear your takes and your priorities here. LMN8R does a good job encapsulating some of the difficulties… A cart seems super-basic, but when you have stuff like the back-compat catalog it’s a reasonably complex undertaking from a development standpoing. And filter-by-genre is one of my own number one asks.
Prioritization and timing has a zillion factors – customer experience benefits, number of requests on the xbox.uservoice.com site, whether there’s an overall OS update coming where it would make sense to launch a feature, time to develop, you name it. But trust me, the folks in charge want nothing more than for people to find shopping a pleasant experience. :) After all, something’s gotta fund us making the next really cool, fun thing.
** As y’all know, I was on Qt3 for years before I was assimilated in Redmond, and I’m not here in any official capacity or representing anyone. But I really do find it super-valuable to hear what you guys think, and I appreciate the time spent on feedback. But this is just a guy asking his friends what they think… Thanks!
