Xbox Clamps Down On ‘Bundle Spam’, Says Developers Are Manipulating The Microsoft Store

New rules being put in place

by Fraser Gilbert Yesterday, 5:34pm

It’s been revealed today that Microsoft is working to combat “bundle spam” on the Xbox Store, issuing a new set of rules for developers and publishers to address the “large number of complaints from both developers and consumers”.

Basically, Microsoft wants to stop these teams from putting out bundles where they’re just combining different SKUs of the same game – for example, separate Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC versions of a title.

The key phrase here is “meaningful differentiation” – if the content is the same across all three versions, Microsoft isn’t happy about them being bundled together. MS wants them to have “Standard, Deluxe, or Ultimate” versions, for example, or for one of the versions to offer a meaningful advantage like resolution or frame rate boosts.

Here’s a bit of what the company reportedly told developers in an email recently (via True Achievements):

“After an investigation, Microsoft has determined that bundles focusing on different platforms with undifferentiated content in an attempt to maximize digital shelf space are incompatible with Section 3 of the Developer Code of Conduct, as they confuse players and are an attempt to manipulate the search results for a game,”

“We will no longer enable bundles that contain different platform SKUs of the same game. Additionally, other attempts to manipulate the Store search results may result in bundles being delisted or not granted.”

There are a few other rules involved with this as well, such as ensuring that “visual and content differentiation [are] clear” and that “a single product with similar or minimally differentiated bundles” is not allowed to take up an “excessive number of slots in new releases, search results, or other Store channels”.

We’ve seen plenty of bundles that could fall into these categories – there are multiple examples on the Xbox New Releases page as we speak – and Outbreak is one that often gets brought up by Xbox fans, with over 60 versions of that series on the Xbox Store. It’ll be interesting to see what happens (if anything) with Outbreak though, as despite it having a lot of bundles, the games inside them generally have “meaningful differentiation” as Microsoft describes it.

Anyway, this is interesting stuff! Let us know your thoughts about it in the comments section below.

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[source trueachievements.com]

Fraser is the News Editor at Pure Xbox, where he spends his time reporting on the biggest stories in the world of Xbox and beyond.

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