We’ve done an enormous amount of work at Xbox, as the whole industry has done, on helping players find great games and I think our store team does a really good job of helping surface great games to players. I think we also have another lens to look at that challenge as we move forward, which is ‘How do we help developers find their audience?’ We have a vast global
audience of players, and for
developers are armed with all the information that they need to to be as successful as possible on the platform, and that we’re doing a good job helping fans find cool games from independent developers. Whether that’s through things like Game Pass, putting games on stage in our summer showcase or promoting them in our store, or even talking about them in blog posts and other places.
How would you characterise your relationship with developers and how has the nature of the relationship changed over the last 10 years? We only succeed when developers succeed, and it’s really nice in that way that our commercial interests are aligned really perfectly. I think our role is about how can we amplify what the developers are doing. It’s ‘How can we use our resources to help developers be more successful?’ Independent developers, in particular - well, we have
developers of all sizes in the ID@Xbox program - but they’re typically going to be smaller. They’re a lot less likely to have a research department and things like that. What we’ve found is that there are places where we can provide information that a much larger publisher might not need - or they have their own access to developing that kind of information. They probably have a lot more data points from just the number of games they’re selling. Whereas an independent developer who’s heads down on a project for two, three years or four years, the one thing we know is that whatever worked in terms of promotion and sales four years ago, that’s gonna have changed, right? A developer making their game is probably not focused on exactly what’s going on in the sales and marketing side of the industry. We can help those developers as they get ready to start the marketing cycle for their game, and have the best possible information.
every good video game, there is an audience. How do we help developers cut through the discovery challenges from their side to find those players? That’s one of the things that we’re thinking about at Xbox now, as we think about the next ten years at the ID@Xbox program.
“How do we help developers cut through to find players? That’s one of the things that we’re thinking about at Xbox now, as we think about the next ten years”
Xbox has been a pioneer for accessibility for years now with controllers, UX and UI best practices and what have you. How does that factor in at ID@Xbox, because obviously things like accessibility are more and more something that’s thought of at the beginning of a AAA project, whereas for a lot of indie developers it is often towards the end. How does the kind of service that you provide lead into accessibility features for the developers you work with? Accessibility is becoming more and more important. Or, maybe the better way to say it is that the importance of it is being more and more broadly understood, right? It’s always been important, but I think in years past, people just didn’t recognize it as much as they needed to. It’s also something that the earlier you think about it in your project, the better. So what I can say on the Xbox side, is that we do a lot of work in terms of what we can do on accessibility with our accessible controllers as maybe the most visible example.
June 2023 MCV/DEVELOP | 21
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