announced it at GDC to sort of celebrate the developers who’ve been part of it. We never were looking for PR on this program, but we wanted to make sure that everybody knows about the program and those two ideas are a little bit in conflict. As we talked it out, James Lewis, who leads the program said ‘I think we need to talk about this publicly, just so all the people who we don’t know and haven’t been able to tell about this can read about it and get in touch.’
What are the long term goals for ID@Xbox in the next couple of years? Keep on keeping on. We’ll continue to provide platform access, and continue to improve the publishing experience on Xbox for developers. Listen to what developers want and try to implement those changes. I think longer term, I really already touched on it because it is about helping them find their audience and continuing to improve discoverability for everyone. It’s the biggest challenge of the digital age as a veteran
developer. I remember back in the day when getting access to the dev kit was a huge hurdle, and then all of a sudden programs like ID@Xbox and similar things in other places made that possible. Then it was access to digital marketplaces like Xbox Live Arcade and Steam. Those kinds of tools really helped developers to get access to the marketplace. Then it was still hard to make a video game and tools like Unity and Unreal and Game Maker made that more straightforward, not to make it easy, but to lower the technical hurdles to ship a video game. Now it’s ‘I can get the hardware, I can make the game, I have a place to ship the game. How do I let people know about it?’ and you know, that’s the challenge of our age, and that’s the challenge that we really need to be focused on in the next ten years with ID@Xbox.
Rare’s Battletoads appeared in Shovel Knight, and the cameo was much loved by retro fans. Nintendo teamed up with the Crypt of the NecroDancer team on a Zelda project and released Cadence of Hyrule. SEGA worked with fans-turned-developers to make Sonic Mania and Sonic Origins. Does Xbox ever think about working with indies to make new entries in their many dormant (but beloved) series? I would encourage a developer who’s got a passion project that they’d love to pursue around a Microsoft IP to get in touch with us and while we can’t make any promises, we will absolutely put them in touch. Without naming any names or anything like that, there have been cases already where we’ve done that, where a developer has had an idea, they know an IP and they’ve reached out and we’ve connected them directly with the right studio.
You started out as a print journalist. What in that ancient and venerable role would you say has helped you succeed in your current one? I think that the number one thing that has helped from being a print journalist and then being a developer too, is just getting to know developers and understanding what makes them tick to some extent in regards to the fears and the motivations. I will tell you that when it’s time to, I approve each and every royalty statement for ID@Xbox,
“I don’t think this is an industry that you can succeed in unless you absolutely love what you’re doing, and you love the content. You need to love games”
and I approve them very, very quickly. When I find out that there are statements ready for me to approve, I drop everything to do that, because I know that getting paid on time is super important. It’s also just understanding how passionate developers are and how much they love what they do in video games. I don’t think this is an industry that you can succeed in unless you absolutely love what you’re doing, and you love the content. You need to love games. It’s just too hard to be successful without loving games, and that’s something that I know in my bones.
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