Every time I criticise the Xbox beta app on here I get piled on by weird diehard gamepass fans
I subscribed to the Game Pass, too, but the Xbox App
is trash. And I rarely use that term because in most scenarios people throw that around it's not true and merely "bad". But this app... there was never anything like this giving me so many problems.
Just the most recent one: Wanted to install a 300mb game, Plebby Quest, and it wouldn't start to download. I tried to pause and re-start the download, nothing. I tried to cancel the download, nothing. The game would be kept in my list, still showing "downloading" but doing nothing. Even restarting the app wouldn't help and I had to reboot my PC. Okay, just a minor inconvenience you would think. Right.
But here comes the real caveat with the philosophy MS is going with their app (sorry for a probably long story but it illustrates my point perfectly):
A while ago, I had plenty and big games installed with the Xbox app (via Game Pass). For a different reason I had to re-install my Windows 10 copy fresh. Now, while most other apps like the Blizzard launcher, Origin, uPlay and Steam can find already existent game files on your PC, the Xbox app can't do that. So I had like 200gb of game files locked on my drive and I couldn't do jackshit with it because
a) it was still locked and Windows refused access and
b) the app isn't intelligent enough to find them.
I thought I could simply choose the same drive for installation and it recognise the games and I could install the new files over the old ones. How naive. The app simply told me: "Can't install there because there are already files there." You don't say...
So, I couldn't uninstall the games properly because the app didn't recognise them properly. I couldn't manually delete them because the files were still locked. I couldn't tell the app: they are right there, just add them to your registry or whatever the fuck you have to do to recognise them.
I ended up spending a whole afternoon brute-force deleting the files that caused a big mess afterwards: my recycle bin was corrupted and the files I manually deleted kept stuck in my recycle bin. Everytime I then wanted to delete
anything on my drive Windows said "the recycle bin is corrupted" and if I wanted to empty it. When I said yes, I saw some files like
S-1-5-21-1529280307-886459329-2985649333-1001 but I couldn't delete them. It said "unspecified error." The files literally stuck in a limbo with Windows not being able to delete them. When I wanted to delete them via console it said: "The system cannot find the path specified" or "Access denied" despite the files being there (not visibly via the user interface/explorer, but the rd /s command via console showed me that files are still there.)
I ended up with formating the partition where the old game files were on. Thanks for nothing, trash software.
If everything goes smoothly, as always, it's great. It works. But as soon as something goes wrong it
really goes wrong. I mean, there isn't even a function to check the file integrity or to move your game folders to a different drive. You can't scan for existing games. What kind of persons develop this without thinking of fundamental functions in regards of gaming?
Game Pass is one thing, the app is another. And as long as the app works the way it does at the moment I won't buy a single game via the app or keep subscribing for more than the 1 EUR they often offer me.
