Starting from Windows 10, Microsoft has included something called Xbox Game Bar in Windows. This is an overlay bar that appears when you play a computer game on your PC. In this bar, we can find controls for recording the gameplay into a video file or capturing the screen in JPEG or PNG image files.
The Xbox Game Bar can be useful for people who want to capture the screenshots or record game videos, but for everyone else it is just an annoyance that should be disabled. We can easily disable it or change its settings on Windows 11 so that it is a little less annoying.
Here is how you can disable Xbox Game Bar on Windows 11:
- Click on the Start button in the taskbar and then on the cogwheel icon labeled Settings.
- In the Settings, select the Gaming category.
- Turn off the option that reads Open Xbox Game Bar using this button on a controller.
If you want to change the settings for Xbox Game Bar then you can press the Ctrl+G hotkey and the Game Bar overlay appears on the screen. Since this is an overlay, you cannot move or resize it using your mouse or touchpad. If you have connected an Xbox game controller with your PC, then you can also press the Xbox button on the controller to display the Xbox Game Bar on your Windows PC screen.
In the Game Bar, you can see all the options – capturing screenshots, recording videos, enabling microphone when recording the screen and more. In the Game Bar settings, we can toggle features like showing the tips when a game is started, remember the currently active program as a game so that Xbox Game Bar pops up automatically, and more. We can also set a theme to be used for Xbox Game Bar – dark or light.