This fall marks an important moment in the history of Xbox as Xbox One readies for its biggest update yet – a completely re-imagined Xbox One, inspired by your feedback, brings the fastest and most social Xbox experience ever. You will also be able to play your Xbox 360 games on Xbox One at no additional cost. The New Xbox One Experience is releasing alongside the greatest games lineup in Xbox history, making it an incredible holiday for our fans.



As director of program management on the platform team at Xbox, I wanted to share an update of what to expect with the transformation in November. At Xbox, we put games and gamers at the center of everything we do. We are inspired by your passion and continue to listen to your input. The New Xbox One Experience will be powered by Windows 10, elevating the gaming experience on Xbox One. Integrating the speed of Windows 10, the New Xbox One Experience will get you to popular gaming features up to 50 percent faster. Instantly start a party, see what your friends are playing, and get updates to your recently played games from Home with no wait time. We’ll also be delivering your most requested feature – Xbox One Backward Compatibility.



Here’s a look at some of the most impactful updates you will see in November:





Play your Xbox 360 games on Xbox One. At launch you’ll be able to play over 100 Xbox 360 games on Xbox One with hundreds more in the months to come. This includes the added benefit of Xbox One features including screenshots, streaming, and game DVR – for your favorite Xbox 360 games. You can even play multiplayer with friends still using their Xbox 360.

A new Guide lets you quickly access essentials with just one button press to save time spent weaving in and out of apps. You can access the Guide from Home by pressing left or double tap the Xbox button on your controller to instantly overlay the Guide. You can access Friends, quickly start a Party, get to Settings, see System Notifications, view your Messages, and more from Home or without leaving your game. These are the top tasks Xbox fans do most often, so we focused on making them faster and easier to get to without disrupting your game.

We’re redesigning Home to make it faster and easier to get to the things you love. We’re introducing a faster and easier interface to provide access to games and apps you’ve recently used. At launch you’ll be able to more easily share your achievements and game clips with the Xbox Live community, see whether your friends are playing the same games and get one-click access to Game Hubs to get news and updates directly from the developers and community themselves.

We’re introducing a new Community section to make Xbox One more social. Based on your feedback, this section is optimized to help you tap into what other gamers are doing on Xbox Live and directly contribute to the conversation happening within the Xbox Live community. Check out what your friends are up to or keep track of the games you follow in the redesigned Activity Feed. Explore the new Trending section to view the most popular posts from players on Xbox Live.

The revamped OneGuide will be your single destination for TV, movies and video apps. From OneGuide, you can see a list of current trending live TV shows with the most viewers at that moment on Xbox. TV listings will now come up instantly and in full-screen, and we’ve added a picture-in-picture mode for TV so you can browse for other things to watch without missing what’s happening in your show. We’ll highlight a selection of the most exciting new movies, TV shows and deals from across the apps on Xbox One and the new App Channels area will show you the latest movies, TV shows and videos highlighted by the apps you care about.

We’re optimizing Store to help you quickly find the content you want. To the right of OneGuide, you’ll find the new and improved Store with features including four easy to explore areas – Games, Movies & TV, Apps, and Music – and a new vertical gallery view to bring more listings at a glance. Browse through intuitive categories like Staff Picks, New Releases, Top played, Top rated, Coming Soon and Recommendations to discover new games, apps, and entertainment for your Xbox One.





As we prepare for the global release of the New Xbox One Experience, it continues to be important to us to get your feedback. To help us do so, we’re gearing up to release the New Xbox One Experience to members of the Xbox One Preview Program. Like all features in the Preview Program, this will be a work-in-progress until it launches in early November. Because this is a significant update, we are giving Preview members the opportunity to decide for themselves if and how they want to participate in helping us release the New Xbox One Experience.



Here’s how it will work over the next couple of weeks:





We will roll this update out over time to Preview members who opt in for it. We’ll start with a set of Preview members who have historically submitted the most feedback – it will not roll out to everyone at the same time. Our goal is to start with a group, get feedback, then roll out to larger groups for additional feedback over time.

If you’re a member of the Xbox One Preview Program, you will get an invitation sent to you in an Xbox Live message.

From the invitation launch the Xbox Preview Dashboard and select the registration option.

You can then opt-in by selecting “Preview – New Xbox One Experience”.

If you choose not to participate in this update (you just leave your registration as preview), you will continue to receive “regular” Preview Program updates going forward. This will not remove you from the Xbox Preview Program.

New builds will regularly roll out over a period of several weeks to those who opt in, and our engineering team will work to improve the features and fix any bugs they identify throughout the preview testing.





The release to Preview will mark a significant milestone on our road to delivering the New Xbox One Experience. It’s important to us to continue to let our fans be a part of the process. Your feedback is incredibly important, so please continue to send us your input at Xbox Feedback and stay tuned for more information about the New Xbox One Experience in the coming weeks.



Thanks, and I look forward to your contributions in making Xbox great.



Mike Ybarra

@XboxQwik