The October Game Development Kit (GDK) is Available Now

Keeping our focus on delighting players and developers alike, the October 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.

The October GDK brings several updates on the system side, adding support for Franchise Game Hubs, which are launchers for games running on Console. To support this new feature, some of the existing APIs for download, update, install, enumerate, query and storage access have been improved or new APIs have been added. The improvements benefit Franchise Game Hubs as well as regular games.

To add to that benefit, Persistent Local Storage can now be marked as shareable between games that are related to each other. A title has to specify this in MicrosoftGame.config, and the related games will be able to read its Persistent Local Storage. This feature can be particularly useful for Franchise Game Hubs, but it is not limited to them.

For the PlayFab users out there, we’re happy to share that the PlayFab event pipeline now supports optional and configurable compression to reduce the payload size, substantially reducing bandwidth consumption for larger payloads with a small impact on CPU consumption and call duration time.

For a detailed breakdown of the October 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.