Xbox just made a load of key changes to compete with Discord — here’s what you need to know

Xbox has announced some big changes to the way Gamertags are working, and over the next year it seems like things could get a lot nicer, especially if you’re currently stuck with B0n3XSt0rm720.

Xbox users will now be able to change their Gamertag to whatever they want, adopting a hash system after the gamertag in the case of duplicates. Thereby B0n3XSt0rm720, whoever they are, will still be known as by their name of choice without a single change. However, if someone sees them rocket past in a Forza Horizon lobby and decides to adopt the nom de plume for themselves, they’ll now be B0n3XSt0rm720#1234 or something similar, letting both players wear the same name.

Related: E3 2019

“We feel that all players should have the opportunity to portray who they are as a gamer and build their identity within the Xbox Community” reads a blog post from Microsoft discussing the changes.

If you’re happy with who you are, don’t worry about a thing. Nothing is changing, and you’ll have no change in experience.

If, like me, you’ve kind of grown out of being known as “Darkwingstalker” in the 15 years since you registered the handle, this is a golden opportunity to change your name to Jake, or… whatever your name actually is. Go wild.

Still, you might want to change your Gamertag anyway, because they support 10 new character sets which Microsoft think will support 200 new languages.

• Basic Latin
• Latin-1 Supplement
• Hangul
• Katakana
• Hiragana
• CJK Symbols for languages in China, Japan, and Korea
• Bengali
• Devanagari
• Cyrillic
• Thai

These topline changes are available now using the Xbox app on PC and the Xbox Game Bar, but will roll out across your consoles and mobile devices over the next year.