Image: Microsoft
Starting and closing a game on a PC is often something of a big to-do — it takes me a solid three minutes to get into Fortnite’s main menu, and the game will hang if I try to put my PC to sleep. This is an area where consoles have a distinct advantage: Xbox, PlayStation, and the Nintendo Switch all have means of going into low-power modes without losing game progress. According to a recent interview, Windows might be getting this capability too (though you shouldn’t hold your breath for it to show up any time soon).
Roanne Soanes, Microsoft’s Head of Xbox Software, recently said as much when discussing some of the console-style adaptations of the Asus ROG Ally. The Ally might be a fairly obvious competitor for the Steam Deck, but it’s built from the ground up for Windows, and the lack of an Xbox-style Quick Resume is something reviewers have noticed. Tom Warren clipped an official Asus video (spotted by ExtremeTech) in which Soanes said:
How do we think about the idea of, you start on your PC, and you just want to take this with you, and you want to pick up where you left off and you want to be immediately ready to go — console has some of those capabilities with quick resume today. How do we think about integrating this into the Windows platform?
Creating a quick resume feature that developers could tap into would be a big job, but not an impossible one. After all, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S both have them, and they’re based on x64 hardware that’s more or less identical to modern gaming PCs. The Xbox even shares a lot of code base with Windows.
The real trick would be getting it to work across a variety of form factors (with laptops and portable devices like the ROG Ally being a big priority), and creating a system that developers would actually want to implement. As noted by ExtremeTech, the new DirectStorage feature could be a great way to kickstart the process, though that’s still a long way off from mass implementation.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer
Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.