We have some interesting new details on what Microsoft’s plans are to make “every screen” an Xbox.
Xbox President Sarah Bond shared the adage “every screen is an Xbox” in an internal meeting with employees, as reported last February. At the time, it only sounded like a soundbyte to sell employees on the idea of bringing Xbox outside the consoles.
We do already have this in some way with Game Pass, which allows subscribers to play the games on the cloud, or natively installed on PCs. But it turns out there was more to it than that.
As shared on the GamingLeaksandRumours subreddit by user Zombienerd300, Jez Corden revealed what he knows in an episode of the Xbox Two +1 Podcast. This podcast usually has them talking with a guest, and for this episode, they happened to have no less than the Game Mess himself, Jeff Grubb.
So here’s what Jez said:
“I actually have some details on exactly what Xbox on every screen looks like now. And I think what it is, is that every Xbox game will have a consistent social UI across all the games, so like if you’re playing Sea of Thieves for example, on the PlayStation, you will be able to bring up a mini Xbox guide, or something like that. Kind of like Battlenet, sort of.”
Jeff Grubb then asks if this would be like Miiverse, to which Jez replies; “Yeah, like a Miiverse.”
Miiverse was a social network that Nintendo introduced to enable bespoke interactions between their players across different games on their platforms. The service launched on the Wii U in 2012, and then came to the 3DS the following year.
But Miiverse did not act like a social UI. It was a walled off social network, that users could view to some degree in the cloud. But the only way you could really post and comment on it was if you were a user, which meant that you had to own either a Wii U or 3DS, so that you could make an account.
In general, all games interacted with Miiverse as a menu choice. You can enter Miiverse mid-game at any time, and post to that game’s community. You could post the screen you were playing, and comment on other people’s posts.
Some games also had specific interactions. For example, in Splatoon, you could post a text or a drawing to Miiverse, by putting it in the Inkopolis Plaza mailbox. Those posts could then be seen as speech bubbles on Inkopolis residents, as graffiti or billboards in the plaza and the stages, etc.
Miiverse grew to become a beloved part of these consoles, even if it seems they didn’t increase sales for consoles or games. For a year, Masahiro Sakurai made a new Miiverse picture post a week, sharing the final months of progress for Super Smash Bros for 3DS and Wii U. There were also many popular posts on Miiverse that went viral outside the network, such as the beloved “Y can’t Metroid crawl?”
It’s no secret why Nintendo shut down Miiverse, even if it was a mistake. Microsoft certainly has more than enough resources to run a social network of their own, but this sounds more like something which will let them interact with their Xbox account, and maybe post to Facebook and other networks as well. An easy way to post clips to YouTube would jumpstart the Xbox user experience.
There’s a lot of potential in this idea, and it’s no coincidence for sure that it sounds a lot like what Sony implemented for their PC release of Ghost of Tsushima. But it doesn’t sound like Microsoft will block most of the world from getting to use their social UI, so they might have something here.
