Summary
Xboxis reintroducing straightforward friend requests, Microsoft has announced. The much-requested feature will be rolled out to selectXboxusers in mid-September 2024.
How Xbox Friends and Followers Work Right Now
Microsoft last revamped this social aspect of its gaming ecosystem back in November 2013, coinciding with theXbox One launch. Since then, Xbox has been offering a Twitter-like social media platform that allows anyone to follow anyone else. And while friends and followers are hence tracked separately in this system, the former are merely people who someone has followed, and there’s no way to filter them for mutual connections, which many have found confusing.
Xbox Is Bringing Back X360-Like Friend Requests
Microsoft now appears to be looking into reverting this 11-year-old system, having justannouncedthat it’s bringing back the old friend requests on an experimental basis. The feature is planned to roll out to members of theXbox Insiders programlater this week, so no later than September 15. Based on what Microsoft has shared so far, it would appear that its upcoming experiment will restore the Facebook-like friend requests from the Xbox 360 era in their entirety, allowing users to send, accept, and delete them.
The arrival of clearly tracked two-way social connections is bound to be welcome news for someXbox users, many of whom have been calling for this to happen over the years. The main issue with the current system is that it doesn’t notify users about new people following them if they are offline. With no straightforward request log to speak of, this implementation can make it challenging to identify users one might want to follow. Making matters even more confusing is that Xbox opted to present these one-way connections as “friends,” when it would actually be more accurate to label them as “followees” or “following,” the latter being how Twitter calls them.
Following the nextXbox Insiders update, users participating in the program will be able to once again leverage friend requests, which will be located in the People tab. The new system will retain the follower classification for one-way connections and automatically update old connections with the appropriate labels. The update will also introduce new privacy settings that will allow users to control who can send them friend requests and follow them, among other things. These will be accessible by navigating to Settings > Account > Privacy & online safety > Xbox privacy > View details & customize > Friends, followers & clubs.
New Xbox Friends and Followers Privacy Settings
As is the case with all Xbox Insiders updates, there are technically no guarantees that the new social system will ever hit the stable channel. But given how long some fans have been asking for friend requests to make a comeback, the chances of Microsoft dropping this feature now that it made it to testing appear slim. Even so, the company has yet to clarify when friend requests might roll out to everyone. In the meantime, anyone is free to join the Xbox Insiders program to try them out.
Xbox Series X
Microsoft’s ninth-generation console, the Xbox Series X is a powerful machine that can support 4K resolution and 60 fps, depending on the game. Released alongside the Xbox Series S, the Series X has a Custom AMD Zen 2 CPU, a Custom RDNA 2 GPU, and 16 GB of RAM.
