How To Customize Your Xbox Series X|S Home Screen

Video games offer an escape, allowing us to enter digital realms and leave behind the mundanity and stresses of everyday life. The next-gen Xbox consoles are at the forefront of providing an immersive gaming experience. Some prefer action-heavy FPS shooters, while others find solace in slower-paced adventures. In either case, turning on your console and being greeted by a familiar array of games is something all gamers, regardless of their preferences, love to see. 

The Xbox Series X boasts a powerful AMD Zen 2 CPU, a fast SSD, and a sleek design — much of which is shared by the compact and beautifully designed Series S console. Beyond the impressive hardware, customizing your home screen layout makes navigating through your library of games more intuitive and enjoyable. Enriching your console with a new wallpaper, a different color scheme, and themes also reflects your style.

The Xbox Series X|S consoles offer the same customization options, allowing you to tinker with your device's home screen for a personalized gaming experience — all easily accessible through the system settings.

Switching colors, changing wallpapers, and messing around with the available themes on your Xbox console will add a touch of individual flair. Most personalization options can be found by pressing the Xbox button and navigating to Profile & System > Settings > General > Personalization. 

• Selecting a background: You can add a backdrop to your Series X|S console from a pool of game art and solid colors or by selecting a custom image. Dynamic backgrounds can add a touch of vibrancy, giving you a livelier home screen.
• Changing system colors: Picking a different color from the settings will result in this hue being applied on tiles and as accents throughout the user interface. You can also toggle between dark and light themes or set a schedule for the system theme to change automatically.
• Customizing your profile theme: There are a few profile themes you can cycle between, which, when applied, reflect on your gamer profile. You can also change your profile picture and the accent color for your tiles. 

To pin a game as a standalone tile on your Xbox home screen, navigate either to the Microsoft Store, the "My games & apps" section, or simply highlight a game you can find somewhere on your home screen already. Press the Menu button on your controller and select the "Add to home" option. This will also display game-related content, such as community posts and your rank. 

If you have groups created, you can add those to your home screen by finding them in the "My games & apps" menu by pressing the Xbox button on your controller and adding it the same way you added a game tile. In case you don't have any groups for your games created but wish to do so, follow these steps:

1. Press the Xbox button on your controller and select "My games & apps."
2. Navigate to See All > Groups, and select "Create a group". When prompted, enter a suitable name.
3. Choose the games and apps you wish to add to this group and select "Add."

To reorder your tiles or groups, highlight the item, press the A button on your controller, and change its position using the D-pad. To confirm the new location, press the A button again. If you wish to remove any pinned tile or group from your home screen, you can highlight the item, press the Menu button, and select "Remove from Home." Alternatively, just pressing the X button also does the trick.