What Xbox players are asking for (and the thing they just got)
A dive into Xbox's new fan-request forums.
Eight days ago, Microsoft opened up a new “Players Voice” online forum where its Xbox users can request features.
What are they asking for?
I explored the threads and can share what I found. I also spotted one request that Microsoft has already reacted to and begun fulfilling.
The top request, with over 19,000 votes and 2,500 comments, not surprisingly, has been for Exclusive Games. That request comes in reaction to the company’s barrier-breaking moves since 2024 to put Sea of Thieves, Forza, Gears of War and even a Halo game on rival consoles.
Writes user Carlos Hernandez:
XBOX was built off of great game exclusives, you cannot sell any consoles without a reason to buy the console compared to your competition or even sending your tentpole games over to your competitor. BRING THEM BACK PLEASE !!!
The second-most requested: Make online multiplayer free to access.
Other top requests include adding more games to Xbox’s Backwards Compatibility program, the addition of Game Pass family plans for households with three Xboxes (or more!), and support for disc-based games on Microsoft’s next console.
Sorting by comment volume instead of votes, the request for exclusives still tops the list. Coming in second is a request for a Ukrainian region setting for consoles. That request is followed by one for full Arabic language support on the Xbox console and in the platform’s games.
The ninth-most popular request was the first to get an Official Microsoft response: Change Playtime from Days to Hours, which would alter how the Xbox interface displays how long someone has played a game.
Microsoft posted on Friday afternoon that it would roll out this change to select users, just a few days after the tweak was requested. That’s a speedy response.
Online, I saw some fans cheer the change; others wondered if platform decisions impacting millions of players were going to be disproportionately impacted by thousands of forum voters—to which others replied, well, go vote, too.
On Friday, Xbox’s head of next gen hardware, Jason Ronald, acknowledged all the fan feedback on the Player’s Voice forums:
In the first week, we have received over 6K+ ideas and suggestions and we have already shipped our first new feature in response to your feedback. Keep it coming. We are listening!
The forums don’t allow for downvotes but do contain counter-points. Under the one about exclusives, for example, many people wanted to see games made just for Xbox (“Brand value perception isn’t built overnight”, “Exclusives are a must because you need to give people a reason to buy an Xbox”). But others said it wasn’t necessary (“Why do I care if someone on PlayStation plays the same game I’m playing on Xbox?”, “Gamepass is the reason me and my wife sold our PS5s, not Exclusives.”).
Oddly, the playing time request, which I had seen last week before Microsoft’s response, was over-written by the announcement of the change. That makes it impossible to look back at the original wording and the discussion under it.
That playing time thread is the only request that has received an official reply from Microsoft so far.
(For what it’s worth, getting an Official Microsoft Response doesn’t always make for the most edifying exchange. Over in the Excel version of the feedback forums, a user who wrote “good” got an official reply stating “We appreciate your feedback to Microsoft.” Last week, I spotted a new Excel feedback forum thread that stated: “yr6486t94w8tiydrdiygisiyglj,” and it got an official Microsoft reply stating: “There is not enough information for us to take any further action on your feedback.” That exchange has since been deleted.)
Some heavier requests show up in the forums. A handful of threads, none with more than nine votes, call on Microsoft to cut contractual ties with Israel (Xbox has been subject to a boycott for the past year over Microsoft’s contracts with Israel and reporting alleging the company’s tech has been used to attack and kill Palestinian civilians; an internal Microsoft review led to the cancellation last fall of one contract.)
Other users have called for lower console prices and/or region-specific pricing of games.
Some of the quirkier requests in the forums include a controller with a quieter d-pad, support for YouTube background playback while gaming, the return of the Xbox One “Snap” feature that ran a secondary app in a sidebar and the inclusion of patch notes for games when they are updated (“We shouldn’t be looking at Steam to get an idea of what’s the latest update even for first party games. Make the hard work of devs discoverable easily”).
The highest-voted request involving a specific game or game franchise: It wasn’t about Halo, Fable or Forza. No, coming in at 51: “New Banjo-Kazooie game.”
Item 2: In brief…
🎮 Bungie is ending development of its 2017 massively multiplayer online sci-fi shooter Destiny 2 with a final update on June 9, saying it was time for the Sony-owned studio to “begin work incubating our next games.”
In May 2025, Bungie had said it was launching a new phase of Destiny 2, the “Fate Saga,” which was to include four expansions, the second of which released in December.
But by February 2026, fans and press noticed that the game’s roadmap for upcoming content was MIA.
Sales of Destiny 2 expansions have been in decline, contributing to big cuts at the studio in 2024.
Bungie is preparing layoffs for next month and doesn’t plan to immediately start developing Destiny 3, should it makes it at all, per Bloomberg.
Bungie’s newest game, the player-vs.player shooter Marathon, released in March, has had a mediocre start, though Bloomberg’s report says Bungie plans to invest more resources into that game.
Destiny and Destiny 2 will remain available to play, Bungie noted.
💰 Star Citizen, the massively multiplayer sci-fi game that has been in development since 2012 or so, has now raised more than $1 billion in crowdfunding, PC Gamer reports.
A single-player portion of the game, Squadron 42, is due for release this year, with the multiplayer version slated for 2027 or later.
🇺🇸 Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, was the best-selling premium game, ranked by dollars, in the U.S. for April, according to research firm Circana.
Circana has revised its ranking system to include projections for digital sales for publishers, such as Nintendo, that don’t share that data.
Capcom’s Pragmata ranked second.
Circana calculated that spending on game content, hardware and accessories in the U.S. reached $4.3 billion in April, up 3% from April 2025. Switch 2 was the best-selling hardware, ahead of PS5 and Xbox Series, in units and dollars.
Personal note: Tomodachi Life certainly has also topped the charts in my household. It’s been my nine-year-old twins’ most-played game since its launch. They’re both hooked on getting their Miis to hang out, date, break up or all of the above.
🟩 Microsoft has hired Matthew Ball as chief strategy officer for Xbox, reporting to new(ish) Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.
Ball is a former Amazon executive, and a long-time investor and researcher, whose annual State of Video Gaming slideshows have been must-reads.
Earlier this year, Ball’s 2026 report explored gaming’s struggle to hold the attention of people who’ve become distracted by social media videos, gambling and crypto.
That report identified five potential areas for industry growth: non-core markets (the likes of Mexico, Brazil, the Middle East, compared to a tapped-out U.S.), advertising, alternate direct-to-consumer payment systems (where game-makers bypass app stores like Apple’s, if possible), outsourcing game development and Roblox.
About Xbox, Ball told Bloomberg, “Our job is to turn around the business, to grow its reach in players and player hours.”
💥 This year’s Call of Duty will be a Modern Warfare game, led by development studio Infinity Ward, per announcements rounded up by Eurogamer.
📉 Ubisoft’s headcount was down to 16,590 at the end of March, according to the company’s latest full-year results.
Studio closures, attrition and a pullback on hiring has significantly shrunk the company since March 2022, when its headcount totaled 20,665.
Ubisoft reported more than €1 billion in losses for the past year and predicted a “lighter new release slate” for the 12 months concluding March 2027. The only big (sorta) title announced for that stretch is July’s promising remake: Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced. (Note: In March, I broke down how severely Ubisoft’s output has slowed.)
The company predicts major releases tied to Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Ghost Recon in the two year span between April 2028 and March 2029.
Ubisoft recently released mobile versions of Rainbow Six and The Division. Mobile editions of its big franchises had previously been touted as a major opportunity for the company, but both releases were described as having “had a slow start.”
✂️ The Embracer Group is planning to split again in 2027, into Fellowship Entertainment (Lord of the Rings, Tomb Raider, Kingdom Come; the studios Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, Warhorse) and Embracer (Alone in the Dark, Killing Floor; publisher/studios THQ Nordic, Aspyr, TripWire).
Two years ago, the Swedish gaming conglomerate said it would split into three, breaking off the board/card game company Asmodee into its own public company (that happened) while the other two parts would consist of a AAA-centric Lord of the Rings/Tomb Raider group and a company containing both a batch of smaller punch-above-their-weight studios such as Coffee Stain (Goat Simulator) as well as mid-level publishers/studios such as THQ Nordic.
But, the Coffee Stain spin-out wound up only including the smaller studios, leaving the THQ Nordic-tier parts of Embracer attached to the AAA LOTR/TR group.
The most recent split gets back to the original idea of there being a powerhouse AAA “Fellowship” group consisting of relatively few big studios—which may well become an acquisition target.
In a letter to investors, Embracer founder Lars Wingefors wrote: “I think the assets held by Fellowship Entertainment are among the most undervalued in the industry and I feel it’s my duty as the largest shareholder to change this and create a structure to realize their full potential.”
As part of the announcement, Embracer said that Kingdom Come studio Warhorse is working on a sequel and on an open-world Lord of the Rings role-playing game.
🇫🇷 The eSports World Cup, the Saudi government backed multi-week competitive gaming, will be held in Paris this summer, not Riyadh, where it ran in 2024 and 2025.
In a press release, organizers said they were running a non-Riyadh location sooner than planned, “in light of the current regional situation,” which is a euphemism for the U.S. war with Iran.
🚫 NetEase-owned Quantic Dream, is shutting down its multiplayer game Spellcasters Chronicles, which launched into early access on February 26 and will be gone on June 19.
The company cited a “particularly challenging market.”
Some 95 jobs may be cut as a result, which led to a union blasting the studio for “catastrophic project management,” Game Developer reports.
🤔 Take Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick shared a notably specific anecdote about how his company uses AI, during the company’s latest earnings call:
“Now I’ll give you a real-world example. I was visiting one of our studios, and they showed me some advertisements that they were putting together to advertise their games. These were live-action ads, and they were funny and cute, 15-30-second ad units that you’ve seen a zillion times. They were all created with AI, licensed AI, legal AI. The script was done in-house for free. Well, by people, colleagues who work at the company already.
“The AI software was used. The entire cost of making the spot was zero. Previously, we hired third-party companies to actually create those with human beings, and those spots could cost $25,000, $50,000, $100,000. Now, please note, not only were we not interested in reducing our head count to make this happen, we didn’t have the opportunity to reduce our head count to make this happen. The entire marketing team at this particular studio is two people. They’re doing a great job. What AI has allowed them to do is be more efficient, make great stuff, and do it cheaper. This is all a benefit to our company.”
Item 3: The week we’re in
Monday, May 25
New Releases:
EMUUROM (PC) is a non-violent creature-scanning Metroidvania. I really enjoyed playing its demo last year.
Enter the Chronosphere (PC, early access) is a colorful top-down when-you-move-the-enemies-move shooter. The demo I played in February was superb.
Paralives (PC, early access) is a new Sims competitor. Not many of them!
Wednesday, May 27
New releases:
007: First Light (PC, PlayStation, Xbox; out later for Switch), from Hitman studio Io Interactive, is the first new James Bond game for PC and console since 2012’s 007 Legends.
Thursday, May 28
Event: The Thinky Direct puzzle game showcase will air online at 1pm ET, and the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase will kick off on Steam. It’s like E3, but just for puzzle games. Expect new games, demos, etc.
New Releases:
Crashout Crew (PC, Xbox) is the multiplayer forklift game cooked up by the part of dev studio Aggro Crab that was not off co-developing Peak (See this Game File interview for more)
Map Map (PC) is a puzzle game about marking the locations of ruins and treasures on island maps.
One Move Away (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) looks like a 3D take on Unpacking, except you’re loading trunks of cars.
868-Back (PC) is a sequel to the great 2015 strategy game 868-Hack
The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time (PC) is a puzzle game about a lost role-playing game and the fake history of its development. A demo of the game caught my eye back in 2024.
Pictonico (mobile) is a new mobile game from Nintendo, just for phones, that turns photos into WarioWare-style mini-games.
Corporate: CD Projekt announces its quarterly earnings to investors… on the same day its developers hold an anniversary livestream for the old Witcher III expansion Blood and Wine…(and, for what it’s worth, there have been rumors of a new Witcher III expansion being in the works).
Friday, May 29
New Releases:
Mina the Hollower (PC, console) is the long-awaited next game from retro specialists Yacht Club Games (Shovel Knight). This one’s a top-down adventure, a throwback to the likes of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.