Whew, took an eternity this! Aside from a few performance hiccups, the lack of mod support for PC games on the Microsoft Store has been a recurring complaint with the distribution platform.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer promised to look into this a few years back.
And well, this feature has finally arrived.
Mod support is now available for the Xbox (Beta) app for Windows 10 PCs, with the Xbox team detailing this latest addition in a blog post. The feature was actually spotted last week, but we now finally have official confirmation.
Before you get too excited, do note that Redmond is not offering its own mode platform.
Instead, the company is basically allowing you to bring your own mods and plug them into supported games. That is to say, you can download the mods elsewhere, and apply them on games that you bought from the Microsoft Store.
This video does well to guide you through the process of enabling and using mods:
As you might expect, the list of games that support modifications like this is pretty small right now.
You have popular titles like DiRT Rally 2.0, Farming Simulator 17, FTL: Faster Than Light, Into the Breach, and MudRunner, that’s about it. Microsoft does mention that it is working with partners to bring mod support for more game over time, so buckle up tight.
Speaking of tight stuff, the latest version of the Xbox (Beta) app has moved from the Electron platform to React Native.
This transition basically ensures that you will get better performance out of the application, and you can expect memory usage to be down to about a third of the previous version of the app.
And while we are on the subject of speed, Microsoft has also confirmed that it is working to improve download speeds for PC games. Some regions are already seeing these benefits, while this enhanced connectivity will be broadly available to everyone soon.
Some much needed improvements for the Xbox Store, these.
