The ninth generation of consoles has tread a rocky road, to say the least. Sony and Microsoft released the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X smack in the middle of a pandemic. The console war ended by default, albeit with PlayStation releasing an anemic slate of games and Xbox practically abdicating the console business. Games as a service flew onto the scene and crashed spectacularly. But amid the turbulence, these consoles offered some bright spots — specifically, Xbox gave us Quick Resume.
Quick Resume is one of those in-the-background features that improves your life without you even realizing it. On Xbox Series X, you can quit out of a game, load up another game, and then go back to the first game without having to load it from scratch. You can juggle up to five games at once, bouncing between them fairly seamlessly. And when you pop back into a game, you pick it up right back to where you left off — no splash screens, no menus, just right into the game. And most miraculously, it continues to function even if you turn your Xbox off.
For the most part, Quick Resume actually works. Multiplayer games seem to struggle on occasion. I find myself having to boot Battlefield 6 and Halo Infinite from scratch each time to avoid server wonkiness. But for single-player games, the feature has operated smoothly for five years running. A 2022 update that allowed users to pin games to a “Quick Resume” group made it even more useful.
Compare this to the PS5’s “Switcher” feature. On PS5, when you pull up the toolbar, you’ll see an icon for the Switcher widget. You’d think this functions identically to Quick Resume, but nope! It simply allows a shortcut to the most recent games you’ve played. You still have to load many games from scratch. (A recent test of the feature allowed for near-instant loading of Ghost of Yotei, even skipping the splash screens. But I had to fully reload The Outer Worlds 2, Despelote, Sword of the Sea, and Bionic Bay.)
Sure, Quick Resume isn’t exactly revelatory. Boosted processing power on both Xbox Series X and PS5 means load times on consoles are quicker than ever. Dating back to 2020, you could boot up PS5 games from the console’s dashboard in about a minute. Is saving a minute really that big of a deal?
Kind of. At least according to some napkin math. As of this writing, it’s been a long 1,827 days since the PS5 became available in the U.S. Let’s assume some broad generalizations — that on average, you play games every day, and that you play two games each play session. So, a minute of unnecessary load time per day, or roughly 30 hours total since the PS5’s release. That’s a lot! To put it into perspective, here are a few things you could do with 30 hours of free time:
So thank you, Quick Resume, for giving gamers an entire French workweek back this console generation.
