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Microsoft announced at Gamescom today that the Xbox One’s Windows 10 rollout will take place in November. We’ve known that the upgrade was coming for a while, alongside DirectX 12 support, but Microsoft had previously declined to put a date on it. The new Windows 10 launch will debut alongside a new UI that apparently diverges from the Windows 8-style layouts that Microsoft has used since the Xbox One launched in 2013. Other new improvements include a new OneGuide design, a Store makeover, and support for Universal apps created with Windows 10.

If you like Cortana, you’ll also have the option to enable her on the Xbox one, and the new universal platform really could go a long way to transforming what the console is capable of. Cortana will also allow you to talk to the console if you have a Kinect, though it’s not clear how many Xbox One owners actually do. Given the way Microsoft’s sales spiked after it killed the mandatory Kinect bundle and began shipping other versions of the console, it’s likely that less than 50% of buyers actually bothered to shell out cash for a glorified paperweight. Finally, of course, there’s the new Chatpad, the Xbox 360 backward compatibility (hopefully in much better shape than it was a few months ago, when Eurogamer tested it), and full DVR support coming to the platform.

All of these features are welcome additions to the Xbox One’s core functionality, and we’ve previously praised the idea of universal applications running on the platform. Microsoft is poised to create a level of integrated functionality between the Xbox One and the PC ecosystem that Sony can’t match, with game streaming both to and from the Xbox One (though the former isn’t formally announced yet). What’s less clear is whether this will result in meaningfully improved sales for the Xbox One itself.

Right now, Sony continues to dominate this generation of game consoles, with recent data suggesting that the Japanese company has sold more PS4’s than Wii U’s and Xbox One’s combined. While the Xbox One continues to outpace the Wii U as far as sales are concerned, uptake simply hasn’t matched Sony, with some data suggesting that the PlayStation 4 is outselling the Xbox One by as much as 2:1. I agree with my colleague, Grant, that this discrepancy isn’t adequately explained by the performance difference between the two — while the Xbox One is slower than the PS4, it’s simply not slow enough to explain a difference this massive. Instead, the gap is likely due to the Xbox One’s disastrous debut. If Microsoft had offered a substantial performance advantage over Sony and a $100 price increase to go along with it, then the Xbox One might not have floundered. Instead, the company tried to kill the aspects of the game industry that consumers wanted, saddled the platform with Kinect 2.0 (which no one asked for), and generally blew its foot off.

Microsoft, to its credit, has done a 180-degree turn from these disastrous policies and is well on its way to creating new and innovative experiences around the platform, even if features like DirectX 12 aren’t actually expected to deliver much performance improvement. The reason for that is simple: The Xbox One already has a low-overhead API, and so the gains we see from shifting to a second may be much smaller than what we’ll see on the PC later this year and into 2016. That’s not a knock on DX12 — just a realistic statement that we shouldn’t expect the API to deliver enormous improvements, particularly if the game hasn’t been optimized for DX12 from the ground up. Still, over time, we could see some significant improvements over time, as games adapt to the new DirectX variant.