The June Game Development Kit (GDK) is Available Now

Keeping our focus on delighting players and developers alike, the June Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) has been released. The key features and fixes highlighted in this blog post are just a handful out of dozens—a mix of improvements for both PC and Xbox development—that improve build or iteration times and deliver powerful tools to optimize your game development experiences. Many of these features are the direct result of developer requests. Thank you for the time, energy, and knowledge you've shared with us.

One of the biggest updates in the June GDK is for the store. Specifically, there are situations on PC in which the Microsoft account used by the store is not the same as the Microsoft account used by the game. In an effort to aid in the detection of this scenario, we’ve enabled the ability for developers to leverage the new XUserIsStoreUser function. For a complete understanding of how to deal with this scenario, refer to the topic “Handling mismatched store account scenarios on PC” on Microsoft Learn.

As we mentioned in the March GDK Update, we’re also excited to share that the Microsoft Game Config Editor is now integrated into the Visual Studio IDE. MicrosoftGame.config files can now be edited using the Game Config Editor directly from within the Visual Studio 2019 or Visual Studio 2022 IDEs. Using the graphical editor makes it easier to associate your project with the Microsoft store and to author correctly formed configuration files.

We’re also continuing to improve our support for PIX, allowing for greater performance tuning and debugging for DirectX 12 games on Windows. In the June GDK Update, we’ve added an editor to the Timing Capture Metrics View that lets you enter custom regular expressions to define a consolidated event, a new visualization for CPU samples in the Timeline view in Timing Captures, and much more.

For a detailed breakdown of the June 2023 GDK Update, check out the full announcement. To learn more about how to use the GDK to develop games on Xbox and Windows, take a look at our public GDK documentation at aka.ms/gamedevdocs or experiment with our public version of the GDK at aka.ms/gdk. Finally, if you’re ready to start creating games for Xbox and Windows, join the ID@Xbox program at xbox.com/developers/id today.