The top 11 things YOU want for the Xbox One

Say what you will about its products, at least Microsoft appears to listen to user feedback. Microsoft’s recent backpedaling on everything from the Windows 8 Start menu to how it handles Xbox One used games is evidence of that.

On Monday, Microsoft quietly unveiled Xbox Feedback, a forum for gamers to bring their concerns directly to the Xbox team. While you can make your own suggestions, you can also vote up or down suggestions others have made, Reddit style. Thousands of votes have already been tallied.

So what do gamers like you want for the Xbox One? Here are the top ten, in order.

“Allow us to unsnap Xbox Music and music to continually play in the background. It is cumbersome to want to play a game at full screen and having to deal with the snapped version of Xbox Music on the right side.”

At press time, this request is the top vote-getter, with over 1,400 votes. Others have asked for the ability to play podcasts in the background, too. Snap’s a good idea, but sometimes it, too, takes up too much space.

“It would be nice to have an app or a section on the dashboard to open a calendar that lists all of the upcoming games and DLC to the platform (if they are announced of course). This would be a great tool to everyone and help raise awareness of games and developers.”

Actually, this would be nice, although developers have an annoying habit of speaking vaguely about upcoming releases: “sometime next year” or “when it’s done” being two popular choices. But as new releases draw closer, this would indeed would be a great addition. Over 1,100 people have voted for it, and it’s rising fast.

“It’s troublesome to “play to” media files from my PC. A full DLNA menu support system would be most helpful!”

The Xbox 360 allowed users to “pull” movies from servers or networked hard drive elsewhere on a network. So far, the Xbox One lacks this capability, and 850 people want it back.

“Update the bluray app to support 3d blurays. Will make the Xbox one a true one box for everything.”

As Ian Paul noted last year, 3D Blu-ray discs are barely a blip on the radar of most consumers, let alone cinephiles. But if Microsoft truly believes in its vision of one console to rule them all, it makes sense to start filling in the gaps. About 700 people have asked for this feature.

“It’s great that Xbox one let’s us know when a game or app has been updated, but we also need to know WHAT CHANGED!

Currently, we always have to go online, looks around the internet on news websites, official game forums and all that to find what changed, and that’s no good.

Xbox needs to be able to communicate that to us via the dashboard, easy and painless.

Here’s a pretty good mock up that was posted on reddit: http://imgur.com/uSmcLcg”

About 669 people want to make this happen.

“I would love to see Spotify app on Xbox.”

About 592 or so people have asked Microsoft to add Spotify, which is available as a native Windows application, to the Xbox One. Spotify is already available for Windows Phone, but it currently lacks the popular free option common to other platforms.

“One or two free movies a month with a Gold subscription. Brings more value to Gold members, another reason to have it.”

This doesn’t sound like a bad idea, and 685 people or so have voted it up. With rival services from Sony to Vudu offering free or discounted movies on a frequent basis, it seems natural that Microsoft could toss in a free movie or two to Live Gold members, in addition to its original content.

“I know personally I hate having to go to the xbox rewards site to claim my rewards or check how i’m doing, have an app on the xbox one which has a friendly user interface and simple to use! You can withdraw your Xbox Rewards points straight from your XB1!”

A matter of convenience, certainly, but this seems a reasonable request as well. Slightly fewer than 600 people have voted for this at press time.

“Basically be nice to be able to rip our CDs onto the xbox one or stream our own music so we can play music in the background while playing games.”

An offshoot of the background Xbox Music request, certainly. And there’s nothing really saying that Microsoft couldn’t make this work with Xbox Music, DLNA connectivity, or even OneDrive. More than a few of the 623 or so people who’ve asked to play their own music would do so while playing Forza, for example.

“After a new OS rollout for example, you have to update every App manually.  Implement a Auto-Update function in the settings which updates all Apps automatically. Like every Tablet and Smartphone do today.  The manual updating make the Apps section really unattractive.”

Auto-updating can occur with digitally donwloaded games, but about 530 or so people want it to be seamless for all games.

“Several years ago there was an amazing feature for netflix… Party mode. This feature was torn from our grasp without notice and left a void in my heart that only it could fill back up. Please bring it back.”

Unfortunately, this is probably up to Netflix, not Microsoft. But it hasn’t stopped 420 people from asking for it back.