Xbox PC App Promises 60% Faster Launch, With No Benchmarks
Microsoft says its rebuilt Xbox app for Windows opens up to 60% faster and loads its Home, Store and Game Pass pages up to 50% faster. No test data accompanied the numbers, which lands the claim in the middle of a launcher speed race that Epic and Valve have already joined.
Microsoft has announced a new version of the Xbox app for PC, saying it launches up to 60% faster than before and that its Home, Store and Game Pass pages load up to 50% faster. The company did not say what the previous launch time was, and supplied no test results. Both figures are stated as upper bounds, not averages.
The launcher became a scoreboard
The timing is not incidental. Epic Games recently promoted faster launch times for a rebuilt Epic Games Launcher, and Steam shipped an update making comparable performance improvements. A launcher is the first thing a player touches and the last thing standing between a click and a game, so speed has turned into something storefronts advertise rather than merely fix. Microsoft's announcement follows that pattern closely.
What an “up to” figure leaves out
A percentage improvement means little without a baseline: which build was measured, on what hardware, against a cold or warm start. None of that was disclosed. The likely reading is that the gains come from work on how the app initialises and fetches content, which would explain why page loads and startup move together. Until independent measurements appear, the honest status of the numbers is a company claim.
For Microsoft the stakes go beyond tidiness. The Xbox app is the doorway to the PC storefront and to Game Pass on Windows, and a slow doorway is a recurring complaint in a market where Steam sets the default expectation. Publishing the method would be the cheaper way to win the argument the company just started.