Never leave the couch again: Order Pizza Hut over Xbox

Hungry video gamers don’t even have to take their eyes off the screen anymore, let alone get off the couch, thanks to a new app that lets you order pizza directly from Microsoft’s Xbox.

Pizza Hut’s new “Create Your Pizza App” launched this week for Xbox Live. It allows gamers to order everything on the menu, and make custom pizza creations.

“With today’s avid gamers and busy modern families gathering around their gaming consoles as much as they gather around a dinner table, we felt this was a natural next step for Pizza Hut as we continue to own the digital ordering experience for pizza lovers everywhere,” said Kurt Kane, chief marketing officer at Pizza Hut, in a release.

Before you completely criticize it as another step in America’s ongoing obesity epidemic, Geekwire’s Todd Bishop points out at least there is a healthy option with the app: it works with the Kinect motion controller “just in case you want to burn a few calories while ordering that 14-inch Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza.”

Or you can just exercise your mouth and use the voice controller instead.

Still, it’s far from perfect for the ultimate couch potato. You have to actually pause your game in order to access the Pizza Hut app (oh the horror.) And as Time Magazine’s Doug Aamoth astutely observes, “there’s no app to unlock your door, swing it open and tell the delivery driver to bring the food downstairs to your rumpus room. You have to get up and answer the door yourself.”

If you’re going to bother, you have to go all the way, Aamoth suggests, calling the idea “half-baked.”

“We can only hope that the next update to this app includes one-button ordering of pre-chewed food, delivered directly into your open mouth (which has been opened by some sort of machine that doesn’t use your energy) by a delivery driver who doesn’t even need to stop his car. Maybe he could slow down and shoot it out of a T-shirt cannon through your open window and into your machine-opened gullet. But then, you’d have to open your window at some point. I guess this system will never be perfect.”