How to Fix “ms-gamingoverlay” Popup Appearing When Playing Games

When you are playing PC game on Windows 10, you might see a strange looking popup that reads – “You’ll need a new app to open this ms-gamingoverlay“. An option is given to look for the app over at Windows Store but of course, the search fails and it cannot find any app on Windows Store that could handle the ms-gamingoverlay protocol.

The reason for this is that somehow you have disabled the Xbox apps in your Windows PC. Some of these apps, especially the Game bar app, are used by modern PC games to enhance your gaming experience. For example, using the Xbox Game bar app you can record the gameplay, take screenshots and even stream your gameplay to various services like Twitch. When this app is disabled, the associated protocol becomes orphan and the strange popup is displayed.

One way to handle this is to just disable the game bar altogether. For this, you can take these steps:

1. Press hotkey Win+I to open Windows settings.
2. Select Gaming and then Game bar.
3. Turn off Game bar by clicking/tapping on the respective on/off flip switch.

After taking these steps the game bar feature will be disabled in Windows 10. But you won’t be able to record the game play or stream it online.

In this method, we are going to re-register all the Windows apps that come pre-installed in Windows 10:

1. Download reinstall-preinstalledApps.zip and extract it to desktop. After this, you will have a file reinstall-preinstalledApps.ps1 on your Windows Desktop.
2. Press Win+X and select Windows PowerShell (Admin) from the menu. This will start PowerShell console.
3. In the PowerShell console give these commands, one command at one time (select Y when asked):

   Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
   $trishtech = [Environment]::GetFolderPath("Desktop")
   cd $trishtech
   .\reinstall-preinstalledApps.ps1
   Set-ExecutionPolicy AllSigned
   

   

The whole re-registering process will take about a minute. It will ensure that all the apps start working once again. You may have to reboot your PC, but in most cases it is not necessary. After this Xbox apps start working and you can test by pressing the hotkey Win+G if the Game bar app appears on your screen.