The Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) is now available on Windows 11 handhelds currently in market and in preview for Windows 11 PCs - such as laptops, desktops and tablets.
For handhelds, FSE brings performance optimizations and the ability to boot directly into Xbox for a smoother, more seamless way to play - delivering a console-like experience designed to minimize friction and get players into their games faster.
And for PCs, the Xbox full screen experience introduces a controller-navigable UI that brings an immersive, console-like full-screen environment where players can easily browse and launch titles from across their game libraries- including the most popular PC storefronts. A powerful Task Switcher enables quick movement between games and apps, delivering a seamless experience.
There’s an update downloading for my Legion Go, hopefully this is included in it. Otherwise I’ll cry. Anyway, this rolled out to every handheld much faster than expected (even the Legion Go 2 said 2026) and they’re now targeting all windows PCs much faster than expected. Makes me wonder what the evolution track will be (because this software currently is much more surface level than it could be). I mean heck, what does Windows 12 (in who knows when) look like with this in mind from the bottom up?
Edit: It’s not! I wonder how they recognize handhelds? Time to go on a wild goose chase on the internet
PC store question for those that may know. How robust is the xbox pc store? I only play solitaire on my work pc (going for every achievement, kill me…). But I thought an older civ game prob runs on this thing and I looked and they don’t have it.
Continuing to try to understand xbox’s console/pc strategy here. And determine if the xbox pc store is useful beyond gamepass/play anywhere/handheld.
It doesn’t have the best support right now, probably mainly games that were formerly in Game Pass and Play Anywhere games like you say, with some exceptions.
Console/PC strategy would ultimately merge the two though, so it should (theoretically) get much better support.
It’s been weak in the past but with this XPA initiative it’s beginning to gain traction. It’s definitely useful beyond Game Pass as a stand-alone now that it’s beginning to get games.
Do you think older games can still make it over to the xbox store or is that history and the only thing xbox can do is get the current games in now and going forward. For example, could civ I - V eventually come to the xbox pc store (I beleive vi and vii are on xbox).
I suppose anything is possible if there is demand but I get the impression there are just so many games over the years that it would be near impossible to match the steam library.
The only official information Microsoft gives is that it’s generally available to handhelds & rolling out to windows insiders who are also Xbox insiders on the Beta & Dev channels on other PCs. But I’m on a Lenovo Legion Go (handheld) & both a windows insider (beta) and Xbox insider PC gaming preview and don’t see it at all. I swear Microsoft and their rollout . There’s been a way to force it using tools to change your Device registry you can find videos on if you’re comfortable with that. Otherwise I think it’s just the whims of Windows. Which is really frustrating. I want to play with it over the weekend, not on patch Tuesday or who knows when .
I understand the rollout. There are a lot of different hardware configurations on windows, but I don’t know why Microsoft insists on marketing this in the most confusing ways every time. It’s always, “This neat new feature is now generally available.” and then like a month or sometimes more before everyone actually gets access to it. There’s tons of frustrated and confused windows users, and many just miss that the feature became available (like they don’t know it exists at all) because Microsoft stopped marketing it’s release.
Older games can definitely make it in, and I do suspect you will be seeing more of them in the future. Their main focus at this time is Xbox Play Any Where.
Steam has close to 100,000 games so yes it would be hard matching that but Xbox could be going for something different. I am of the opinion that things are repeating. The Steam machine is coming out again and when PC games began to boom early in the last generation every publisher suddenly started their own launcher, and I fear Xbox open store console might re-ignite that. A lot of publishers might opt to have their own store where they make the bulk of the profits with that possibility Xbox could be going for a Google Play store kind of move. The Xbox full screen experience is becoming more like the de-facto PC gaming hub which Xbox could use to bring everything gaming under one roof almost reminds me of the one ring in Lord of the rings.
Also, there are over 1 million games on PC and more than 90% is not on steam.
Have to keep in mind that being on the Xbox store means games meeting a bunch of requirements including stuff like achievements. So they’d actually have to go back and update the games for them to be on the store. So pretty unlikely for old games.
Interesting point. Xbox has so much going on right now achievement revamp likely very low on list. But maybe in a few years when all these changes settle down they could revisit it and include a solution to make retrofitting achievements in older games simpler for the devs.
I played around with this quite a bit over the weekend and it’s off to a decent start. I already had Steam installed in BPM along with a few games, and it worked very well indeed.
Installing games from EA Play, EGS, GOG, and Ubisoft Connect, threw things off for me though. As depending on what game you go for, you’ll be forced to interact with Win11 to update the store app, enable firewall permissions, sign-in again, etc.
They’ll also need to make sure we can actually browse/uninstall our games from those stores by the time it goes fully live too.
My hope is that due to Microsoft’s heavy push of the Xbox app/Full Screen Experience, this will encourage the other app stores to add controller navigation as a bare minimum to their apps.
While the perfect solution would be to have every library populate the Xbox app, allowing you to install directly, I’m perfectly fine loading a third party app as long as I can do everything with a controller (like accessing Steam Big Picture mode via the Xbox app).
. There’s been a way to force it using tools to change your Device registry you can find videos on if you’re comfortable with that. Otherwise I think it’s just the whims of Windows. Which is really frustrating. I want to play with it over the weekend, not on patch Tuesday or who knows when 
.