Xbox users will soon be able to watch Discord streams and make direct calls

(Image credit: Discord/Microsoft)

This week, Discord is beginning to roll out some new features for Xbox users, bringing the console experience a little bit closer to the PC experience.

The update will integrate Discord activity with the Xbox friends list, showing who's chatting in Discord Voice under the "Happening Now" section. Xbox users will also be able to watch Discord streams directly from their Xboxes, whether their friends are screen sharing from PC, mobile, or another Xbox.

It's nice to be able to have a friend's stream on in the background, but I wonder about doing it without another monitor—it's not clear if watching a stream on the Xbox takes up your whole screen or if they've got some kind of windowed solution.

Discord remains the most popular way to communicate with fellow gamers, despite the various complaints that have built up across its rise to dominance. The company reportedly resisted an acquisition attempt by Microsoft in 2021, which I'll speculate was probably a good thing.

I've used Discord to watch my friends make pushes for Immortal in Dota 2, coordinated raids in EverQuest, and hung out with the crew for Path of Exile launches. Hopefully these new features will help Xbox users share some of those same experiences a bit more smoothly, and allow multiplatform gamers to swap more seamlessly between PC and Xbox.

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Russ has been playing PC games since the top of the line graphics were in ASCII and has been obsessed with them just about as long. After a coordinated influence campaign to bamboozle his parents into getting a high speed internet connection to play EverQuest, his fate was well and truly sealed. When he's not writing about videogames, he's teaching karate, cooking an overly complicated dish, or attempting to raise his daughter with a well rounded classical education (Civilization, Doom, and Baldur's Gate, of course). He's probably mapping in Path of Exile right now.