side, who are enthusiastic supporters of these games and really love them. I said a little earlier, we had paid out $4 billion to developers over the last 10 years, but it’s the Xbox fans that have supported independent games to the tune of $4 billion on Xbox over the last 10 years. I think those are the two major factors in the success of the program. I do think Game Pass is tremendous. For game fans, it’s a great way to get access to hundreds of games for one low monthly membership fee. For developers, it’s a fantastic way to ensure that their game is seen by millions and millions of people. We do think there’s some great synergistic relationships there, but ultimately, it comes down to developers making games people like, us making sure fans get to see them, and players buying them.
founded. Lots of people know we had more games come out last year via the ID@Xbox program on Xbox than ever before. But there’s always new developers. Developers move around and I think that even developers who’ve previously had success shipping games on Xbox are always curious to hear the latest. Both in terms of program results - we announced at GDC that we had paid out more than $4 billion to independent developers since we founded the program - but also just the latest in terms of what we’re seeing on the platform and in general in the industry. We’re in the fortunate position where we get to see
an enormous amount of data as a platform holder in terms of sales, in terms of trends, and that kind of thing. There’s always material that we can share there that I think developers find interesting. One of the reasons why I’m excited to go to Develop is that we started this program by listening to developers, we’ve never stopped listening, and we’re always working to change the program and grow the program and evolve the program based on their feedback. So something like Develop is ideal for those conversations as well.
ID@Xbox hit ten years old recently, and last year Game Pass hit five years old. Both of them are obviously very successful. How much of that success is reliant on their interdependence? I think ultimately the success for ID@Xbox is reliant on game developers continuing to make amazing games. Luckily, we have no shortage of amazing games and then there are our fans on the other
20 | MCV/DEVELOP June 2023
First party isn’t necessarily your area, but in an age where for a long time Xbox has been criticized for its first party titles, does it come into your thinking? When it comes to the games that you look at for ID@Xbox and maybe the volume of games that you need to look at? It honestly doesn’t. Our focus in the program from the start has been, ‘How do we help independent developers find success?’ and I do think independent developers are a crucial part of the mix on Xbox. When we started the program, if we had any insights that turned out to be true, it was just knowing, coming off the back of what we’d seen on Xbox Live Arcade, how important independent developers were going to be to the future of video games, full stop. Making sure that we had a program that would serve those needs and enable those developers to get their games onto the platform was crucial, but we’ve never really thought about it like, ‘We need this percent of indie games versus this percent of other types of games.’ or anything like that. It’s really a situation where it’s the more the merrier, and we want to just ensure that there’s platform access, that independent
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