Closing an Idea Drive: Learn More About the Future of the Xbox Insider Program

By On 11 Dec, 2018 At 02:21 PM | Categorized As Xbox | With Comments Off

We’re excited to announce that the Xbox Insider Idea Drive has been marked “Complete.” As a team, we’re incredibly grateful for all the terrific ideas and comments you submitted over the past few months. To close out, we’d like to review some of your top ranked ideas and provide a quick update on where they’re at:

Have an Icon Next to Gamertag to Show You Are an Insider (1461 votes) – We haven’t been able to provide Xbox Insiders with an icon for their Gamertags; however, we recently invited Xbox Insiders to redeem exclusive Xbox Insider Avatar gear via the Xbox Insider Hub. Learn more about our Level 2+ and Level 10+ Avatar shirts.

Integrate Microsoft Rewards in the Xbox Insider Program (1056 votes) – While we don’t have a specific update for this, we can say we’re researching this idea and other similar possibilities! For now, we plan to stay focused on bring our community early access to some of the coolest Xbox features and games out there!

Adding the Xbox Ideas Site into the Xbox Insider Hub (1042 votes) – After looking into this, we realized that more than 70% of the traffic to the Xbox Ideas site is from a mobile device or tablet! So, with most of the traffic off-console, we plan to keep Xbox Ideas on the web. You can access the site through the browser on your Xbox console at any time, however.

Reward Insiders with Access to Alphas, Betas or Game Previews (1053 votes) – This is one of our primary goals, and we continue to partner with more and more game studios. These partnerships provide you with a sneak peek at a variety of games prior to general release while also ensuring game studios receive early feedback. It’s important to keep in mind that studios often choose to invite a specific subset of the Xbox Insider audience based on their needs.

Avatar Shirts

Reward you with items from the Store (1028 votes) We’ve accomplished this by offering two Exclusive Xbox Insider Avatar t-shirts, now available to Xbox Insiders who have reached Level 2 or higher and Level 10 or higher! We have more thoughts on what we’ll deliver in the future, but we do want them to be a surprise. We’re also encouraging game studios to provide DLC or Avatar gear as a “thank you” for your participation in their specific game flights.

Xbox Insider Hub on Mobile (603 votes) – We’re currently exploring different ways to offer the Xbox Insider Hub on a mobile device. Imagine being able to review Quest steps on your mobile device while completing them on your console or being able to join a flight and start downloading a game beta while on the go! Although we can’t currently do this, we are researching the work that would go into each of these scenarios and prioritizing from there.

Have more content available to Xbox Insiders (577 votes) – So far this year, we have had over 20 game flights, including Sea of Thieves, Super Mega Baseball 2, Vigor, and Fallout 76 as well as app flights for Twitch and EA Access. Additionally, we have worked closely with the Xbox Platform and Localization teams to create more Quests and Surveys to gather structured feedback based on your Xbox One Experience. Our goal has been to have at least 1 Quest or Survey for every new Xbox feature, and to have from 1-5 surveys for each game flight, at the studio’s discretion. We’ve had Quests covering the new Avatar experience, My Games & Apps, and Store features like Wish List and Shopping Cart! Keep an eye out for more opportunities to provide feedback on new Xbox features and games in 2019!

Xbox Insider Blog

Providing more details and consistent release notes (544 votes) – We launched the Xbox Insider Blog a little over a year ago for this explicit purpose and have since posted ~300 stories, spanning release notes, playtest announcements, Team Xbox Q&As, and more. You no longer have to launch the Xbox Insider Hub to read release notes, you simply need to check out the blog from a browser on your phone, tablet, PC or other Internet-connected device. We also worked with our mods to breathe life into the Xbox Insiders subreddit, where you can find and discuss every single Xbox Insider Blog post, and we unveiled the @XboxInsider Twitter account last summer.

Add Achievements to the Xbox Insider Hub (544 votes) – We prize transparency, and because of that, we’ll say that we don’t have plans to do this due to technical limitations. Xbox Insider XP (eXperience Points) may not seem quite as exciting as popping an Achievement, but it is a great way to advance your status in the Xbox Insider Program and gain access to even more game previews.

Notify me via email when new content is available (473 votes) – We’re currently exploring ways to improve notifications and are also planning to allow Xbox Insiders to express their interest areas or preferences for previewing content with the program. For now, the Xbox Insiders Blog is the best place to go to find this information, but thanks for letting us know that email is much preferred over SMS-based notifications.

These are just a handful of your Top Requested Ideas for the Xbox Insider Program. We look forward to your participation in 2019 as we continue to release new Xbox System Updates and work with studios to provide more and more game playtests. As always, thanks for being an Xbox Insider and helping shape the future of Xbox on console, Windows and mobile devices.

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire