Xbox finally rolled out its long-awaited new UI yesterday, but it's not going down well so far. On the Xbox subreddits, players are angry about the lack of customisation, forced 'ads', and reduction of groups, resulting in a more streamlined and less user-friendly home page.
"PLEASE tell me I can get rid of this," Spiderwolfer posted to the Xbox Series X subreddit. "Ever since the new Xbox Home Screen update I have been punished with this awful, unmovable tab titled, 'Most played games'. This wouldn't be entirely horrible if it contained MY most played games but it doesn't. It contains Xbox's most played games, most of which I don't even own."
Others in the comments agree such as xCeePee who said, "The new update kind of polluted things." NotFromMilkyWay added, "This redesign only exists because they want to drown us in Game Pass ads". With hundreds of upvotes, it's clear this is a sentiment shared by the community.
Those who took part in the Insiders program say this is a sentiment that has been shared for months, dating back to September of last year, but that little has changed between now and then despite weekly feedback. "Team Xbox has completely disregarded our ability for customisation," DoobiousRogal said. "Makes me wonder why they even opened up a weekly thread to provide feedback if all they did was make some tiles smaller and shift them down halfway [...] Pretty much all customisation other than the background, colour, and light/dark theme has been removed."
"They limited [the groups] to two," Pixel_Mechanic added. "Many wrote about this every week in the Insider forum. I wrote several posts stating this issue in the Insider Hub. There was no change. It's been like this from the start. Only thing I noticed was at least the two I add will showup whereas when I was testing they would overwrite each other. It was very clearly stated each week that we want customisation and we don't want a huge game pass ad."
A common thread in these posts is that, aesthetically, the update is a big improvement, but burying the home page in unavoidable Game Pass tabs has undermined any positives. "The update sucks I want my groups back and I don’t need all the advertising," Interesting-Trash-41 said. "This is such a BS move especially with them advertising it as being what the players wanted because it was done with our feedback but then they removed basically all customisation."
With insiders claiming that customisation has been a sticking point for nearly a year now, it's unlikely we'll see any drastic changes now that it's live. In the meantime, you'll have to make do with the new update.