In 2018, one of the testers at work made a note on Slack:
Is anyone else getting a "Press Win + G to open Xbox Game Bar" notification when opening our software?
This was a little surprising since we happened to be working on healthcare software, where users don't typically request achievements or Twitch streaming support. Even so, Windows had suddenly decided that our app qualified as a game, and I couldn't tell why:
- Did the Game Bar just trigger for every program that starts in fullscreen mode?
- Was it guessing from the application manifest or other metadata we'd forgotten about?
- Were we doing something in WPF to get our app flagged as DirectX-heavy and game-adjacent?
The answer was far simpler:
To determine which apps to pop the Game Bar for, Microsoft just ships a giant list of games' executable names:
Our app just happened to share its executable name with a recently released game. Thankfully it never became an issue, but we did add a doc section on disabling Xbox apps by group policy, just in case...