Very few things are as annoying as accidentally triggering the Xbox Game Bar when you are in the middle of a game, and having your entire screen taken over by a tasteless overlay. That's precisely why I disable the Game Bar as a part of my Windows setup ritual on new laptops and desktops. The Xbox Game Bar is supposed to be a one-stop shop for gamers on Windows with all the right tools in one place, but it's far from that, in my opinion.

Not only is it completely unreliable with tools that don't work a lot of times, but it's also missing a lot of crucial features that I've been yearning for years. The Xbox Game Bar is far from where it needs to be right now, and here are a few things Microsoft can do to make it better with the upcoming launch of Windows 12, so I don't have to disable it every time I set up a new PC.

1 Add advanced recording options

With support for at least 4K recording

The Xbox Game Bar makes it very easy to record your gameplay, but the recording options themselves are very limited. Firstly, there's no way to record 4K gameplay with the Xbox Game Bar, which is a bit of a bummer considering how 4K gaming on PC has become commonplace in 2023 with an abundance of 4K graphics cards for high-end PCs. With that in mind, the "Standard" and "High" recording options that top out at 1080p resolution simply don't do justice to those gaming at relatively higher resolutions.

Nvidia's ShadowPlay, which is a great alternative to the Game Bar for recording, allows you to capture gameplay at up to a whopping 8K resolution. That's definitely overkill, but the fact that it's an option for those who may need it is great. The recordings also top out at 60fps, which is again not on par with other recording software such as OBS which lets you capture at 120fps. I'd personally be more inclined to use the Game Bar for capturing clips from my gameplay if there was an option to record them at in-game resolution, albeit at 60fps.

While we're discussing clips, it's also worth highlighting that the Xbox Game bar only lets you save the last 10 minutes of instant replay footage. While that's plenty to save the footage of, say, your 1v1 clutch in a crucial fight or something cool that happened in your game, it's certainly not enough to save in case you forgot to hit the recording button before you started playing, or you want to save the entire sequence of a particular missing leading up to something cool that happened.

2 Allow direct broadcasting

The lack of any broadcasting option seems like an oversight

The ability to broadcast live gameplay from the Game Bar used to be a thing back in the Mixer days, but it's no longer an option. Microsoft recently added the ability to play and stream games for your friends in Teams, but you can't stream your gameplay to platforms like Twitch or YouTube. That's not great since other tools like Nvidia's ShadowPlay make it very easy to broadcast live on various platforms. This definitely seems like an oversight, considering there is an option to stream your gameplay directly from the Xbox consoles without the need for any dedicated hardware or software.

This isn't necessarily a deal-breaker considering how dedicated streamers would prefer better and more reliable programs like OBS, but a basic broadcasting tool would definitely benefit casual users like me who occasionally stream for fun and hang out with friends in chat. Not everybody wants to go through the hassle of setting up OBS all the time, so a simple broadcasting tool could turn the tide for Game Bar.

3 Take control of Game Bar widgets

It's all over the place right now

The ability to add widgets to the Game Bar overlay is a great idea on paper, but I am afraid it hasn't been implemented well. The lack of high-quality, useful widgets for Game Bar is a huge letdown. Besides a couple of options like Spotify, XSplit, and the newly added "Microsoft Teams Play Together," there's hardly anything that's worth adding to the overlay. Not to mention, there's no way to search or filter to find the right widget from a huge pile of rather underwhelming options either, making the overall experience even worse.

Even the default widgets that you get with Game Bar have plenty of room for improvement, in my opinion. Resources, for instance, is a great widget that quickly tells you what applications are running on your PC at any given point, along with the resources being used. But it doesn't actually let you end the task that you think isn't as important. This means you still have to open the Task Manager separately to get rid of it, defeating the entire purpose of such a widget. Similarly, the Xbox Social widget opens a new chat window instead of opening the chat within the same widget box if you want to chat with your friends.

4 Simplify the overly cluttered interface

"Less is more"

The Game Bar overlay, as you can see in the screenshot attached above, can get overly cluttered at any given point based on the widgets you're using. Yes, you can pick and choose the widgets and retain the ones you often use, but the overall interface seems unnecessarily cluttered from a design perspective. Even the pinned elements that are meant to be shown persistently on the screen take up a lot of space on the screen. Here, take a look at this pinned element from the "Performance" widget that's persistent on the screen while you're gaming.

There's no way to tweak and make it display just the FPS, so you're left with a persistent box on your screen, taking away from your immersive gaming experience. You can adjust the transparency to make it less visible, but just the option to view the FPS without additional information would've been better. I can't say I am a fan of how some Game Bar settings show up within the Game Bar overlay menu, while the rest are buried deep inside the Windows Settings page. Not only does it make things unnecessarily complicated, but it also goes to show how much effort went into creating and refining this application for a cohesive experience.

5 Turn it into a universal launcher

Essentially, a dock with all your installed games

I touched a bit on this topic while discussing ways to improve the Xbox app on PC, and I believe it's crucial to make the overall gaming experience better in Windows 12. I like how the Game Bar lets you launch games from directly within the overlay without having to open a dedicated launcher or a program. It makes it incredibly easy to jump between different games or when you quickly want to launch a game you like without having to go through a separate launcher like, say, the Epic Games Launcher or Steam. But the fact that the Game Bar only shows the games you've downloaded from the Microsoft Store makes it very limited.

A simple and easy way to fix this is by turning the Xbox app or the Game Bar into a universal launcher, from which you can launch any game that's installed on your PC. Think of it like a dock in your overlay, showing you all the games that are installed on your PC. This is guaranteed to make the Game Bar a lot more useful as there's nothing quite like it out there.

Closing thoughts

The Game Bar is one of those programs that holds a lot of potential to significantly improve the overall gaming experience, but it's severely lacking in its current state. I hope to see some meaningful changes in the future, so I can consistently rely on it as my go-to overlay while playing games. I'll continue using Nvidia's GeForce Experience until then, which I believe is a lot better than the Game Bar in many ways.