A recent blog update over at Kotaku has suggested that a new Xbox Dashboard upate is pending. Whether or not this dashboard will be mounted with a banhammer for modded consoles remains a mystery, but what we do know is that Microsoft are planning to introduce a few new features regarding child safety and a family Xbox Live account. One of my biggest gripes with Xbox Live is the fact that you can’t just have one Live account for the whole family. You’ve had to pay a single subscription per person, and that my friends is complete bullshit! Microsoft are introducing a family subscription, but don’t jump for joy, it comes at a premium. Rather than giving added value and tying it in to a set number of local profiles, you’ll have to pay a whole lot more to play online. Is it worth it? Not really.

Fortunately allot of game developers have allowed Live Guest which enables people to jump in as a guest on your live account to play online. Such bastions of these features include Halo 3, Gears of War and FIFA to name just a few.

With increased parental features (see picture) such as the ability to dictate a Microsoft Points balance, whether they can play online, have an online status and be given the ability to purchase DLC at all is a very nice addition from Microsoft. It gives peace of mind to those whom have their credit cards stored on file. As for the Dashboard update in itself, it’s nothing majorly drastic, but it sprucens everything up a little and gives it a visual lift. The predicted date for this update hits around the usual November time of the year.

As you can see, the typography has changed a little bit and it could be argued that a new default background will be used also. These changes may fail to excite allot of people, but what with the wealth of options already available on the system, would Microsoft really have space to bulk it up more, without jeapordising existing DLC sales and making navigation confusing for the user?

What do you think? We’d love to hear from you as always.