Xbox is trying to make it easier to tell which games you’re allowed to play

theverge.com:

Scrolling through your Xbox game library, it can be difficult to tell which games you can actually play at the moment — perhaps you downloaded something from Game Pass, but it’s no longer on the service, or your friend came over to play a game and took the disc it was on home with them. Microsoft is currently testing a solution to this problem, with badges that will warn you that a game can’t be launched, according to Xbox engineering lead Eden Marie.

In a Twitter thread, Marie explains that the feature adds two badges on screens where you see games, like the homescreen or game library. If you can’t play a game because of licensing issues — say, it was taken off of Game Pass, or you’re currently not logged into the Xbox Live account associated with the game — you’ll see an exclamation mark on its thumbnail. If you need to insert a disc before playing a game, it’ll show an icon with a crossed-out disc. Currently, the test is for people in the Xbox Alpha & Alpha Skip-Ahead Insider groups, which Microsoft says are usually “invite-only.”

In this screen, Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil Resistance are disc installs where the disc isn’t currently inserted, Rain On Your Parade previously left Game Pass, and Steep belongs to a user that isn’t signed in (and this isn’t their Home Xbox). pic.twitter.com/yvxk3WAf7E

It seems like a useful feature, letting you know at a glance which games in your library you can actually play, helping you avoid the situation where you see a game in your library and get excited to play it, only to receive a (potentially less-than-helpful) error message.

When asked if the test would make those error messages clearer or if the system would respond to something like an Xbox Live outage that temporarily