Xbox One's fight for independents

PlayStation has aggressively courted and attracted huge independent developer support in recent months, and even dedicated an entire Gamescom press conference to showcasing indie-made games.
But now Xbox is fighting back with its ID@Xbox initiative. MCV learns more from the programme’s director Chris Charla...
Why launch this independent developer programme? Is it in response to PlayStation?
The origins of this programme go all the way back to the architecture of the Xbox One. This is something we have been planning for a long time. If you go back to the Xbox 360, and you see what we did with Xbox Live Indie Games, you can see where this started. That was our self-publishing programme on Xbox 360, and I think we got a lot of things right with that. Every retail kit was a dev kit.
The community curation was an interesting experiment that I think was very successful for that programme. We brought a lot of great creators into the Xbox ecosystem. But the things that were challenging were that you couldn’t access the whole Live stack. You didn’t have access to Gamerscore or achievements. The indie games were sold in a separate section on the marketplace, which at some phases in the Dashboard’s history made them difficult to discover for casual players.
Talking to developers who came through that programme and those who worked on XBLA, and just thinking about what’s best for independent developers, was really the genesis of this programme.
Why do indie developers matter? Common consensus is that indie games aren’t system sellers.
Independent developers are hugely important for the entire games industry ecosystem. When I look at everything that is happening in game development as a player, I am massively excited by games such as Titanfall, Call of Duty and Halo. I love those games. But I am equally excited when I see games like Papers, Please, or Gone Home, or Limbo, or Castle Crashers.

"I would argue there has certainly been
system sellers that have been independent
games – Minecraft is a system seller. On
Xbox One, I think Killer Instinct is going
to sell systems. That is by an independent
developer in Double Helix."

Chris Charla – programme director, ID@Xbox

It just speaks to video games no-longer having to be this or having to be that. Video games can be a hugely diverse thing. Independent developers have the freedom to do more quirky titles, and do different things. And at the end of the day, it's about when you turn on your Xbox One, you just see the broadest, most diverse spectrum of entertainment around. That is why they are so important because they bring that spectrum to players.
I got my Xbox 360 on the day it came out, I stood in line in the freezing rain to get it. And my big ‘next-gen’ moment during the 360 lifecycle was when I came home on a Wednesday and turned on my console and suddenly there was a new game to play that hadn’t been there before. Every Wednesday there was a new Xbox Live Arcade game to play. It was like rushing home from school to watch a TV show when you were a kid. That is what was really cool to me about it.
But can they help you sell Xbox One hardware?
I would argue there has certainly been system sellers that have been independent games – Minecraft is a system seller. On Xbox One, I think Killer Instinct is going to sell systems. That is by an independent developer in Double Helix.
It is all about bringing this rich tapestry of diverse content to players.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/xbox-...ndents/0122316