"Gaming Features Not Available" In Game Bar Now (Steam Version)

I got a response from Support, basically saying the issue has been passed onto the team for testing. Hopefully they can figure it out.

It's a weird one, and appears to be only affecting Sea of Thieves.

I tested some other games on Steam and they all worked fine and I was able to record clips - Lightyear Frontier, Portal 2, Escape Academy, Party Animals, Fall Guys.

With the exception of Lightyear Frontier, they were all automatically recognised as games and Gaming Features was turned on by default.

With Lightyear Frontier, I had to click on the option to get Game Bar to recognise it as a game but the setting saved correctly (unlike with Sea of Thieves) and everything worked after that - but that's an Early Access game so may have something to do with that.

Fall Guys even uses Easy Anti-Cheat, and that did not have any problems whatsoever being picked up. Notifications even popped up to say the clips were recorded. So we can't even blame EAC on this one.

Hello
I've the same issue
did all the reset and stuff nothing is working ..

I've already put in a bug report for this issue, so Rare are aware of it. But I suggest anyone else with the problem to also submit a ticket. The more people do it, the more likely it will be looked at.

It may be Game Bar needs an update or it could be to do with the game. If it's Game Bar, I am hoping Rare will get in touch with their Microsoft colleagues to see what's happening there. While EAC is not directly to blame, it could be all the configuration Rare did to get that functioning has messed up the game's ID or something.

So, yeah, if you can't record clips or use LFG on Game Bar, Gaming Features not being available is the reason.

@realstyli game bar is mostly broken for me. Has been for months. No amount of updates or reinstalls fixes any of the issues. Microsoft needs to sort it out.

@qu1etone said in "Gaming Features Not Available" In Game Bar Now (Steam Version):

@realstyli game bar is mostly broken for me. Has been for months. No amount of updates or reinstalls fixes any of the issues. Microsoft needs to sort it out.

It's been broken for me and my friend since the March 21st Game Bar update specifically. So it is most likely a Microsoft issue but, as it's only affecting Sea of Thieves (as others have also noted), Rare need to communicate that there is a problem there with their colleagues at MS to get it sorted.

Can confirm this is only an issue with seas and not other games. Will send a report ticket.

@kostuchh Not yet. It DOES work if you simply record but it wont work if you want to grab a clip. So now when I game if I see an enemy ship coming for example I click record and 5 minutes later or whatever I stop the recording and it works fine that way. I prefer the clip way of doing things though. I have background recording active and set to 3 minutes so after something cool/funny/odd/whatever happens I could just click windows and G together and boom. Clip Captured. That wont work now.

@atlass1337 said in "Gaming Features Not Available" In Game Bar Now (Steam Version):

The reason game bar doesn't work is Easy Anti-cheat. It either has something to do with EAC launching after SOT and thus Game bar doesn't recognize it as a game OR the fact that EAC detects Game bar as a third party program.

Just to point it out, Game bar doesn't work on any other EAC games either.

Incorrect. It works on Fall Guys.

And it also worked on Sea of Thieves up to the March 21st Game Bar update. There were a few weeks where there was no issue with SOT, EAC and Game Bar.

@majkon13 said in "Gaming Features Not Available" In Game Bar Now (Steam Version):

@realstyli yes he is correct, just because it works for Fall Guys doesn't mean it is made properly for Sea Of Thieves. EAC is different for most of the games (in fact in many games these are individual updates of EAC just for certain game) and it doesn't work the same way in all games, that doesn't even make sense cause each game has different aspects and probably uses different rendering tools etc. So stop trh talking when you have no idea about the thing. And yes I can confirm that when I launch the game and EAC appears I press win+G for game bar and it shows everything as it should but as soon as actual game launches it breaks and everything related to game is gone.

The issue is with Game Bar NOT EAC.

Fact 1: it was working fine after EAC was introduced, for several weeks, and ONLY broke on March 21st when Game Bar updated.

Fact 2: It works with Fall Guys, which uses EAC (albeit the standard EAC and not EOS). In FG, I can record clips and take screenshots using Game Bar. It even gives the notification from Game Bar that it is doing it.

Yes, games have to be configured correctly for EAC, and that is another issue. But this problem has been caused by an update to Game Bar, not EAC.

I would like to add, that this is what I said a month ago:

While EAC is not directly to blame, it could be all the configuration Rare did to get that functioning has messed up the game's ID or something.

And I still believe that to be the issue here.

@majkon13

I didn't update Game Bar either. It did it automatically on March 21st, and again on March 27th. It's an autoupdate in the MS Store. If you check MS Store and go to your library, you will see the March 27th update.

I find it INCREDIBLY unlikely that this feature breaking on March 21st and an update to Game Bar happening the exact same day are unrelated (again, this was weeks after EAC was implemented).

And I'm not going to mess around with anything that may interfere with EAC running correctly, as that can lead to Hazelnutbeards. Not all "fixes" are safe to do.

All this shows is that there is a misconfiguration issue with SOT and EAC, which is what I have been saying all along. Rare have somehow messed up the game's ID to get EAC to function, and that is why Game Bar no longer sees Sea of Thieves correctly.

@majkon13

Happy Sailing.