Microsoft exec Chris Charla talks about the evolution of the ID@Xbox program, how it's going in its ninth year, his biggest disappointments, and why small games tend to be able to explore one idea fully.
In discussing the mission of ID@Xbox — which allows indie developers to, after applying, receive development kits and digitally self-publish their games on Xbox One — Charla talks first about Xbox Live Arcade for Xbox 360, which held an original vision of arcade games. “Indie devs came in there and started doing amazing things,” he says, adding that indie development was progressing so rapidly that it was outpacing the ability of Microsoft to keep up.
“A bunch of different people at Microsoft got together,” Charla explains, including Angela Hession, Blake Fischer and himself, and they came up with the idea for what is now known as ID@Xbox . “The core idea was really simple,” says Charla. “In order to ensure our players have access to the broadest array of content, we had to make it as as easy as possible for developers to ship on the platform.
The whole spirit of the program was that, when a developer came to the team at Microsoft with a game idea, Charla’s team would figure out how to make the answers to their questions be “yes.” If that project then required a lot of work internally on the Microsoft side, people like David Ashbrenner — who serves as ID@Xbox’s senior program manager — would become involved and work to automate the process.
“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,” says Charla. He adds that games from independent developers make up a huge fraction of the games that are on Xbox. In a
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