Microsoft"s social ambitions for the Xbox Live platform seem to be coming together with ongoing projects such as Xbox Clubs, Beam integration, and Game Chat Transcriptions. However, the company clearly has a bigger vision for the platform and that entails letting developers access some of these features to increase social engagement on their games. Case in point, Xbox Clubs.
Announced at E3 last year, the social feature for gamers of the platform allows them to find their friends, share in-game screenshots and chat with other members of the club. A new document suggests that Microsoft may allow game developers to integrate the functionality of Clubs to their games via an Application Program Interface (API). They will be able to use the API to create structures such as clans and multiplayer guilds, and then sync them to Xbox Live. The Redmond company is targeting an April launch, so an announcement may be just around the corner.
The document also indicated several improvements to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) APIs for Xbox such as developer optimizations to leaderboard systems, stat tracking, and various hardware analysis improvements. Not much is known about the new feature yet, though. One thing for certain, however, is that the company is trying to challenge Twitch"s relatively mature platform.
Source: Windows Central