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Microsoft is finally giving all Xbox owners the option to disable Quick Resume on a per-game basis. The feature was tested with Xbox Insiders in March, and now Microsoft is rolling it out with a collection of other new options for consoles and the Xbox PC app as part of its April Xbox update.
When the Xbox Series S and X launched, Quick Resume was one of the consoles’ flagship features. With Quick Resume, you can suspend one or more games and switch between them without losing progress, even after turning off your console. That works for most games, but if a game needs a consistent internet connection to run (like an MMO, for example), you’d often get bounced back to the main menu, have to wait for it to reconnect or be forced to restart if you tried to use Quick Resume. With the option to toggle Quick Resume off for those games, now you can avoid that five-car pileup of small annoyances.
Besides Quick Resume, Microsoft is expanding the number of groups of games you can pin to your Xbox home screen, letting you set a custom color for the Xbox interface and making it easier to find your play history for a given game. On PCs, the Xbox PC app will now let you use any gamepad to move your mouse cursor, pin your favorite games in the “jump back in” or “most recent” menu and add any installed app or game to your Xbox library, even if you didn’t download it from Microsoft. That’s on top of the new Automatic Super Resolution feature Microsoft is starting to test on ASUS ROG Xbox Ally handhelds.
This more frequent pattern of software updates is reportedly a deliberate effort under new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to “recommit” to the Xbox and reevaluate the gaming brand’s strategy. Among her recently implemented changes is a price cut to Xbox Game Pass, which lowered the most expensive Ultimate tier from $30 per month to $23 per month.
