Independent Developers @ Xbox, Spawning a New Wave of Innovation for Xbox One Games

Editor’s Note: Today at gamescom, Xbox Vice President Phil Harrison announced details about a new program called Independent Developers @ Xbox (ID@XBox), which enables game developers of all shapes and sizes to build, publish and sell their games digitally on Xbox One. Chris Charla is helping to lead the charge for Xbox and provides more details on the program below.

I was an independent developer for 10 years before coming to Microsoft as the Director of Portfolio for Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) and I’m excited to be taking on a new role as the Director of ID@Xbox.

Any time someone asks me about Microsoft and independent developers, I think back to Microsoft’s vey first product, created in 1975 in a college dorm room by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. It was a tool for developers – BASIC for the Altair 8800, the first personal computer. It took the Altair from a box with switches and LEDS that didn’t do all that much to a machine that could be used by a wide array of people to do a lot of really interesting things, like write games.

Ever since then, Microsoft has had a heritage of enabling developers to do great things, and that support continues today. We kicked off independent developer innovation for console gaming in 2004 with Xbox LIVE Arcade on the original Xbox with more than 20 titles featured by the top independent developers of the time including Garage Games, PixelStorm and Popcap Games.

On Xbox 360, Microsoft helped pioneer console digital distribution with Xbox LIVE Arcade, and the result was an amazing flowering of fantastic games, mostly created by independent developers. Many people say Summer of Arcade 2008 was the start of an indie “golden age,” as independent developers like Jonathan Blow and The Behemoth introduced games that went on to become huge commercial and critical successes. And the golden age doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The fastest-selling new IP in XBLA history, “State of Decay,” was just released in June, which speaks to the strength of the XBLA ecosystem (and the quality of the game — Undead Labs knocked it out of the park!).

Today on Xbox 360, every XBLA game needs a publisher, either a third party like Activision or Electronic Arts, or Microsoft Studios, Microsoft’s first-party publishing arm. We enabled self-publishing on Xbox 360 (by using a retail kit as a development kit) a couple of years after its launch via Xbox LIVE Indie Games, which is very popular. There are some great Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) games (“Super Amazing Wagon Adventure,” anyone?), but those games don’t have access to the full Xbox Live tools, they can’t use Kinect, and they don’t have Achievements or Gamerscore. Some people have said XBLIG games can be challenging to find for casual players.

Now we’re on the cusp of …read more