Game Bar Presence Writer

Purpose

Game Bar Presence Writer is a component that is notified when a game's "presence" state (i.e. is a game running in the foreground) changes. This functionality is available in Windows 10 and later operating systems. By default, the existing Game Bar Presence Writer will set a user's Xbox Live presence state for a running game if the Xbox App is installed, the user is signed into their Xbox account, and the user has enabled Xbox Live presence to be set when they run a game on their PC. It is possible for Windows Application developers to override this default behavior with their own implementation.

Important

By providing a custom implementation of the Game Bar Presence Writer, the default behavior of a user's Xbox Live presence state being set when they run a game will no longer be available.

Implement an out of proc COM server that implements Game Bar Presence Writer functionality

In order to provide a Game Bar Presence Writer implementation, you must implement an out of proc COM server that implemented the following COM interfaces:

import "oaidl.idl";
import "Inspectable.idl";

#include <sdkddkver.h>

namespace Windows.Gaming.GameBar.PresenceServer.Internal
{
    // typedefs
    typedef enum GameNotificationEvent GameNotificationEvent;
    typedef enum AppIdType AppIdType;

    typedef UINT64 WindowId;

    interface IPresenceWriter;
    runtimeclass PresenceWriter;

    // enums
    enum GameNotificationEvent
    {
        None = 0,
        GotFocus,
        LostFocus,
        AppClose
    };

    // enums
    enum AppIdType
    {
        Aumid = 0,  // Application User Model Id
        TitleId     // Xbox Live Title Id
    };

    [uuid(782674D9-5CBB-4FCA-AD72-D9AC5F7AE963)]
    [exclusiveto(PresenceWriter)]
    interface IPresenceWriter : IInspectable
    {
        HRESULT UpdatePresence([in] WindowId hWnd, [in] GameNotificationEvent @event, [in] HSTRING appId, [in] AppIdType appIdType);
    }

    [marshaling_behavior(agile)] 
    runtimeclass PresenceWriter 
    {
        [default] interface IPresenceWriter; 
    }
}

When a game is ran on the user's machine, UpdatePresence will be called with the following parameters:

hWnd [in]

A handle to the window of the running game.

event [in]

Event that correpsonds to whether the game got focus (GotFocus), lost focus (LostFocus), or the game as was closed (AppClose).

appId [in]

Application Identifier of the game. If appIdType is Aumid then appId is the Application User Model Id. If appId is TitleId then appId is the Xbox Live Title Id.

appIdType [in]

Specifies if appId corresponds to the Application User Model Id (Aumid) of the game of the Xbox Live Title Id (TitleId) of the game.

Register COM server implementation for Presence Writer

In order for your implementation of Game Bar Presence Writer to run, it must ensure the following registry value is set:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsRuntime\Server\Windows.Gaming.GameBar.Internal.PresenceWriterServer\ExePath

Data type	Range	Default value
REG_SZ	Path to the executable