Xbox Series X with black and white controllers under a TV

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Throughout the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S console generation, it feels like Microsoft has been giving players excuse after excuse as to why they don’t need to be playing games on Xbox consoles. From the Play Anywhere initiative with PC to Xbox Cloud Gaming to its recent efforts to bring all of its first-party games over to PS5, you don’t really need an Xbox console to bear the fruits of Microsoft’s gaming efforts.

Despite that, I keep playing games on my Xbox Series X, making it my primary console for third-party gaming. There’s one thing about the platform that keeps me playing, and it’s not Xbox Game Pass anymore. No, the feature that keeps me playing games on Xbox Series X five years after launch is Quick Resume.

What is Quick Resume?

And why is it so useful

If you don’t own an Xbox Series X or S console, you may be unfamiliar with Quick Resume. Essentially, it creates a save state for the game on the system level. Even after you boot up another game, turn the system off, or unplug, you can still resume games with Quick Resume and start playing from exactly where you were in the game.

Let’s say you’re in the middle of playing Keeper and notice that Ninja Gaiden 4 has finished installing. You exit out of *Keeper *and boot up Ninja Gaiden 4 to check out its first couple of chapters. After playing for a bit, you then switch to the backward-compatible version of Gears of War 2 before turning off the console for the night. The next day, you can boot any of those games back up with Quick Resume and play right from where you left off with them.

Games staying active while a console is in sleep mode isn’t very revelatory. The PS4 and Xbox One had that feature. Quick Resume is more impressive because it works with games from previous console generations, when the console is completely turned off, and juggles multiple games at once.

If you know where to look, you can even find your games saved with Quick Resume in a group in the console’s “My Games & Apps” menu and pin the ones you want to keep saved as you play more games. Doing all this doesn’t clog up additional storage space or affect game performance, so there’s no reason not to use Quick Resume if you’re playing on this generation of Xbox consoles.

Quick Resume is a feature tailor-made for how I game

It makes playing through multiple games at once much easier

If you’re the kind of person who only plays a game or two a year on console, you might not think much of Quick Resume. It’s more noticeable and useful if you play a lot. Personally, I can play upward of 100 games a year for work, and Quick Resume saves me a lot of time as I bounce from title to title. When playing through a lot of games at the same time on PS5 or Nintendo Switch 2, I don’t have that luxury.

The one caveat to using Quick Resume is that most online games don’t play well with it. While most support Quick Resume, you’re often booted back to the main menu when you lose connection. Still, the benefits that come from being able to easily hop back into a new single-player game like The Outer Worlds 2 more than make up for that with me.

When I think about the hardware innovations in each console generation, the ones that stand out to me most often affect how I interact with games. More meaningful gameplay experiences have come from features like the DualShock 4’s touchpad or the Switch’s ability to play games on a TV or on the go.

Quick Resume is a much subtler feature, but just as impactful in some ways. The fact that Quick Resume isn’t that noticeable means that the feature is doing its job correctly. It’s also a good fit for a console that’s trying to get people to play more games through Xbox Game Pass, even if that appeal has become less alluring through this console generation.

Quick Resume is the best innovation of this console generation

I hope it sticks around on future consoles

Quick Resume may not affect the design of first-party Xbox games, but it has changed how I’ve played games on the hardware for the past five years. It’s one of the main reasons I still find myself playing games on Xbox hardware, even when Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft itself are giving us reasons not to.

While I’m not sure what the next generation of consoles will look like, I hope the next Xbox and PlayStation consoles have some form of Quick Resume. It’ll also stand as the one true great innovation that I think Xbox introduced this console generation. As such, it deserves praise and attention, as I think about why I still enjoy playing games on the Xbox Series X on its fifth anniversary.