The first Xbox One update of 2015 consolidates the latest about all of your favorite games

By Will Fulton Published February 9, 2015

The first system update of 2015 has been released for Xbox One, according to Microsoft’s Major Nelson. The update includes improvements to established features like watching TV and party chat, and introduces a new Game Hub feature to consolidate all the content, tips, and community activity for your favorite games into one convenient spot.

Every Xbox One title has a Game Hub now, available by pressing the menu button while selecting the game from your dashboard. There you can see who among your friends is playing and how you measure up against them and the global leaderboards. A steady stream of content from both fans and developers populates a feed, keeping you up to date on the latest news. Opting to follow a game from its hub incorporates that content stream into your main activity feed.

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Controllers have been improved as well, allowing them to pair with the console more quickly on startup. Party chat also gets some love, with greater stability and faster load times when chatting with multiple people. New icons and updates have also been implemented to make chat status and invitations clearer.

The OneGuide TV listings feature now includes live trending shows across different platforms, allowing you to stay up to date on what people are watching and how. Various elements of the service have been rolled out to multiple countries that support OneGuide, which have now been joined by the Netherlands.

Users can now better highlight their custom backgrounds, enabled in November’s update, by adjusting the transparency of home tiles. Read the full run-down of features included in the update over on the Xbox Wire.

Former Staff Writer, Gaming

Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

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