Microsoft's Chris Charla Talks the Evolution of ID@Xbox Program
ID@Xbox's director, Chris Charla, shared how the self-publishing program evolved and talked about the bottlenecks while publishing indie games.
An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Chris Charla, the senior director of the ID@Xbox, Microsoft's program that allows independent video game developers to self-publish titles for Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S, has shared how the initiative evolved and told about the bottlenecks while publishing indie games.
According to Charla, the idea of creating ID@Xbox first started with Xbox Live Arcade, a digital video game download service launched in 2004 that focused on smaller downloadable games from both major publishers and independent game developers. "Indie devs came in there and started doing amazing things," Charla said. At this point, Microsoft realized that smaller titles were essential for the company providing the players with a larger variety of games.
Sable
Following that, several people from Microsoft "got together" including Angela Hession, Blake Fischer, and Charla himself, later coming up with the idea of what we currently know as ID@Xbox. "The core idea was really simple," said Charla. "In order to ensure our players have access to the broadest array of content, we had to make it as easy as possible for developers to ship on the platform."
Charla explained that Microsoft's intention was to make things as easy as possible for developers, so when devs came to Charla’s team with their game ideas, they would then involve in the process and work out how to deal with various issues.
"The beautiful thing is that a lot of our initial assumptions about the importance of indie games and their growing, continuing importance, have turned out to be accurate," Charla said. He also noted that currently, indie games make up a massive part of all the titles that are on Xbox.
Shotgun Farmers
Charla shared that the program's approach to publishing indie games is not to "dictate what content we want to promote ... just looking for things that are really neat and fun". He added that this is what helps the company to follow its initial mission of bringing a huge array of content to its platforms.
Elsewhere in the interview, Charla also noted that the process of publishing has not always been smooth saying that sometimes games can underperform the developers' expectations. "Probably the biggest bummer to me is when a game has disappointing results and it's because of something that is really outside of the developer’s control," he explained.
You can find full Chris Charla's interview with The Hollywood Reporter here. Also, don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
