Microsoft has launched a new Game Bar feature for Windows 11.
As reported by Windows Central, the Game Bar has a new Compact Mode that seems to be custom made for the recent wave of new Windows 11 based portable gaming handhelds.
Now, the Xbox Game Bar has already been part of Windows for some time now. It allows Windows users to do screen capture of photos and videos, access Xbox social, and others.
The big issue with Game Bar is that it isn’t tweaked for gaming handhelds. Now, that need didn’t really exist a decade ago, and it was still very niche when GPD launched its first Win Max gaming handheld.
But today, many gamers have devices like the ASUS ROG Ally, and the Lenovo Legion GO. Both ASUS and Lenovo added their own systems to make it easier for their users to access settings to use Windows on their platforms, but they couldn’t address everything. Game Bar Compact Mode makes it so that you can use a game controller, and for that matter, the controllers built into the ROG Ally and Legion GO, to access all of Game Bar’s features.
But on top of that, it already allows you to quickly open one of many PC game clients. We can see that aside from Xbox and Steam, it can open up Battle.net, Ubisoft Connect, and GeForce Now. Whether you personally use these clients or not, Microsoft would be best served if they built this into Game Bar Compact Mode.
Now, Microsoft is supposed to be feeling the competition to make this happen from the Steam Deck and its SteamOS, but that may be more on a product vs. product basis, and not really on the OS level.
I’m sure any Steam Deck user can tell you the handheld makes more sense for them, even if they can’t play every Steam game they own, because it’s an easier experience overall. It feels more like playing a console, whereas it’s inconvenient to get around Windows without a mouse and keyboard. That’s the experience ROG Ally and Legion GO users are stuck with.
But, if you didn’t know, Valve has been tardy when it comes to their promises of making SteamOS available for users. The SteamOS image that they have up now is years old, and gamers who want to run the OS actually use HoloISO, a custom build of SteamOS that’s updated regularly. An outsider developer made HoloISO, just because Valve has failed to make their prized OS available to everyone.
But what we’re really saying here is that neither Valve or Microsoft have really perfectly brought the PC gaming experience to handheld, at least not yet. While it may be best if Microsoft ultimately made a custom gaming OS, such as an Xbox OS, to use on Windows gaming handhelds, this is clearly a great step forward. It now depends on Microsoft’s staff to bring in everyone’s clients – as varied in scale and popularity as Genshin Impact and Runescape – to really make this useful enough that everyone will take it seriously.
If you’re curious enough to see this in action, you can watch the demo video below.
