The developers we talked to at PAX were really excited that games self-published through ID@Xbox will have full access to all features that any other game on Xbox One has – Gamerscore, Achievements, SmartGlass, and of course Kinect. (We saw a couple of great motion and speech games that we’re extremely excited to see come to Xbox One.) Reaction was also great to the news that we’re putting independently published games in the same game store as every other game on Xbox One. I think the game industry, and especially the independent scene, has matured so much in the last couple of years that separate marketplaces for “indie” games is trending toward old fashioned.
We’re going to be at Tokyo Game Show in a couple of weeks, meeting with Japanese developers about the program and getting their feedback, but in the meantime we’re spending a lot of time talking with the developers who’ve already applied to the ID@Xbox program.
As we mentioned at gamescom, our program is starting small to help us smooth out any rough spots, but we’re planning to open it up as broadly as possible as quickly as possible, and for those who we’re not able to send dev kits to right away, we’ll be providing a lot of technical information that will help them get their games ready for Xbox One, even without a kit. Eventually, of course, our plan is that any Xbox One will be able to be a dev kit. This is part of Microsoft’s vision that in addition to being the best machine for entertainment, Xbox One also enables everyone to be a creator.
