The 2023 iteration of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) is ongoing, and with it, we learn a lot of new insights regarding the current progression of the gaming industry. Today, Xbox talked about the ID@Xbox Indie Publishing Program, which is going through its 10th anniversary this year. The program has become a very fruitful endeavor as it has helped bring over 3,000 games to the Xbox platform while doling out over $4 billion to developers.
ID@Xbox started as a program that wanted to help indie developers after the immense backlash that they suffered back at GDC 2013 from developers. This program would adapt to the changing and growing needs of the indie developer community. Since its release, it has supported more than 3,000 games from independent developers. This number is nothing to scoff at since this is more than the total number of games released on Xbox and Xbox 360 combined.
Additionally, Xbox has helped with many ventures for indie developers, allowing them to stay in the competition against the bigger budget titles with programs such as Xbox Game Preview and the ability to cross-platform play with friends on PC and other manufacturers’ consoles. That particular one took a while to fully implement (wonder why), but it was still a successful venture once the cross-platform idea became increasingly popular among developers.
ID@Xbox has also worked with developers so they could participate in programs such as Xbox Game Pass, allowing them to reach audiences in a way that was never seen before. This particular venture has managed to help a lot of games on the platform to gain a lot of popularity through curiosity. Games like The Riftbreaker managed to get some long-needed exposure and players through the program.
Still, even Microsoft admits that ID@Xbox is not a perfect program, and its issues stuck out the most during the pandemic as communication between devs and Xbox was becoming more complicated. Because of this, Microsoft will launch a new process that provides a template with all the information developers need to submit for deal consideration. This new accelerated program will also allow developers to provide faster feedback on concepts and to have access to decision-makers over at Xbox.
This new accelerated version of the ID@Xbox program aims to ensure that indie developers also get their game into deal consideration quickly while ensuring that the game variety currently found in Game Pass remains. This process will require a mutual NDA to ensure that developers’ IP rights are protected. Still, details regarding this and the accelerated program will be discussed in greater detail on April’s ID@Xbox newsletter.
The ID@Xbox Developer Acceleration Program is the name of this new initiative which Microsoft and Xbox will use to help indie developers more efficiently. The company admitted that it had booked over 200 meetings on this iteration of the GDC alone. However, they still have to make sure that underrepresented indie developers have equal access to these resources, and as such, this new acceleration program will do just that.
