Help Xbox Help You

Andre Vrignaud (Gamertag: Ozymandias) from the Xbox team has published an official call for feedback regarding all things Xbox Live. The online service has undergone tremendous changes since its inception shortly after the release of Xbox 1. According to Vrignaud, the future path of Live points towards an increased emphasis on digital distribution and media integration (Zune, TV, IPTV, mobile, etc.). He called upon the Xbox fan community to submit their suggestions and ideas to further enhance Live and continue to make it the greatest online gaming platform.

He stressed the desire for grand, long-term ideas:

"What do you want to see? Think big here - ideally, think about what you want to see over a five-year period, and how your ideas evolve over that time. What's the crawl step for your idea? The walk? The run?"

I've been using XBL for all of two weeks but still felt compelled to offer up some improvements. In hindsight my suggestions were hardly grand or visionary but it looks like I wasn't alone in taking this rare opportunity to sound off on anything Xbox, whether it be the games, hardware, accessories or Live. As they say, the devil is in the details, and XBL has only reached the it's currently impressive state after a few years of evolution.

Here's what I threw into the fray:

• Ability to group friends in friends list. Be able to send one message to a group of friends.
• Conference chats with friends
• Streamlined access to shared music files from Dashboard. Maybe a "Recent Playlist" hot list.
• Simplified keyboard GUI for writing messages on XBL. I resort to using "internet speak" anyway, so why not allow users to switch to an internet speak-friendly keyboard? Sort of like T9 predictive texting in cell phones.
• Dedicated servers for popular (or all) online games
• Support for more video formats other than .wmv
• Allow for downloading of podcasts and video podcasts
• More power conservation/auto shut-off settings. Six hours is too long.
• Reduce XBL subscription fee (hey, worth a try!)

Not the loftiest wish list, I know. I'm definitely in the honeymoon stage with XBL so it was still strenuous to come up with all that. I'll probably dedicate a gushing post to it in the near future but for now I'll just say that I am amazed it works as well as it does. Given more time to familiarize myself with Live, I think I could come up with a dozen more ideas that go beyond piddly things like auto shut-off settings. I mean, who needs to let their Xbox idle for 6 hours? (there's probably some grist for another topic)

Every corporation out there plays lip service to having top-notch customer service and caring about customer feedback. If the Xbox team and Microsoft actually make good on the best, most feasible customer ideas, it will go a long way to not only taking Live to the next level, but also establishing Xbox as the game console that listens to The People.

Head on over to Ozymandias' blog and leave a comment with your own brilliant ideas for Xbox Live!