Most of what we’ve been hearing about the Universal Windows Platform from the gaming side of things has been pretty negative lately. Quantum Break came out of the gate pretty broken, and other games suffered from some serious limitations. But UWP is way bigger than that, and it opens the Xbox One up to the possibility for all kinds of apps. One of the very first ones, it looks like, will be a favorite of geeks everywhere, VLC Media Player.
Thomas Nigro, who is leading development on the Windows Store version of the VLC player, announced that the application is getting a UWP edition. That means it’ll be not only on Windows 10 both as a regular and Windows store app, but Windows phones and, starting this summer, Xbox One.
While there are certainly ways to play media on your Xbox One – the on-board media player and over the network via applications like Plex both work – VLC is known for being able to play just about anything you can throw at it, and now that flexibility is going to appear on a game console.
If the UWP initiative can pick up steam, and if other popular apps can make their way to the console, we could see a very, very different Xbox One a year from now that does all sorts of stuff we’d never imagined a game console doing. The application is set to hit Windows 10 and Windows Phone in May. The Xbox One release is a bit further out, but if you’re developing for Xbox One you can already try it out through the development side of the console.
