One interesting feature about Xbox Series X/S that generally flies under the radar is the ability for people to easily enable Developer Mode on the consoles, which allow users to develop and run custom code on their Xbox Series S|X, without the need of a developer kit, after paying a one time fees.
Recently, fans have been noticing that Microsoft has either been disabling or removing the feature from various Xbox consoles, which led to recent speculation of the company cracking down on the feature, as Developer Mode also gives the ability to run emulators for various old generation consoles not related to Xbox.
Jason Ronald, the Partner Director of Program Management at Microsoft Xbox, recently went onto Twitter to dismiss the claims, saying that the company has no plans of removing or disabling Developer Mode off of Xbox console, as they support a “healthy independent app and game development community on Xbox.”
Ronald cites the reason for the issue to be accidental deactivation while the Microsoft was doing their scheduled maintenance of cleaning up old inactive accounts. He says that the company is actively working on fixing the issue, and requests people affected by the issue to reach out to them via the email posted in the Twitter thread (see below)
In other news, Xbox Game Pass users are in for a great month, as the service is adding in a great number of titles in January, including Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, Outer Wilds, and others such as Rainbow Six Extraction and Nobody Saves the World.