Official_Xbox_Magazine_USA_Issue_202_July_2017

The big inTerview
“i feel excited
because Creators
Program could be
a super fertile
place for talent
to show their
stuff on Xbox”
of games you’d like to see?
I think we’ll see a huge variety of stuff. We’ll
see things that don’t quite fit the traditional
definition of “game”. We’ll see hobbyist and
professional projects… we’ll see a lot! I think
one thing that is true of every platform is if
you build a space that makes it easy for
people to ship games, you see a lot of stuff!
What I’m most excited to see is something I
can’t even conceive of right now—and I
really think Creators Program has a good
chance to be a super fertile place for new
talent to show their stuff on Xbox.
Is this an ‘in-route’ for developers to prepare
them for making a full ID@Xbox game, or are
the two things aimed at different kinds
of developer?
One really key thing about ID@Xbox, and
Creators Program, is that they are gamebased
programs, not developer-based. So,
I’d say it’s a thing that will probably be
decided on a game-by-game basis. You may
have a developer who starts out, maybe
she’s in school, and she has a cool student
project, and it comes out via Creators
Program, but her next game comes via ID.
And you may have a long-standing ID dev
who makes a game and wants it out there
quickly and just ships it via Creators. From a
developer point of view, what we want to do
is make sure that regardless of where a
developer is in their journey, or regardless of
how they want to handle their game, that we
have a place for them in our ecosystem,
from hobbyists and experimenters, to
moonlighters and rookies, to professionals
and veterans. That ensures we’re going to
get a huge variety of games on our platform,
The Big
Names
2015
ShOvel KnIght
after being funded on
Kickstarter, the iD@xbox
Program helped Yacht club
games make this game
(and its fantastic Dlc) an
xbox reality.
which is great for our players and helps build
just a great ecosystem for both players and
creators to thrive.
Steam’s greenlight program suffered from a
‘bloatware’ problem. Do you foresee this
being a problem with the Creator’s program?
Do you have a way of curating what appears
in the Creator’s program Store?
I’ll handle these two as one question if that’s
okay! I can’t really comment on Steam, but if
2016
ROCKet leAgue
the iD@xbox program
helped this (previously
PS4-exclusive) rocketpowered
car football game
make its way to xbox. it’s
bloody good fun.
2017
CupheAD
it’s been in the works
for years and regularly
appears in iD@xbox
showcases. one day, this
beautiful platformer will
actually launch…
you’re asking about marketplaces, it’s a
great question, and one we’ve thought
about a lot. When you think of traditional
retail shopping, humanity has had about
10,000 years to perfect things. On the digital
front, we’re really only 10 or 15 years in, so
we’re still learning a lot. Both curated and
open marketplaces have advantages.
Curation works to make discovery and
surfacing things easier, but you run the risk
that the curators miss something. Uncurated
marketplaces don’t have that risk, but they
run the risk—or the certainty—of having lots
of noise-to-signal because there’s no one
really policing things.
With Xbox Live Creators Program we
thought about this a lot. And I think the
solution Microsoft came up with is actually
really interesting. So, on our PC store, all
games are assorted together today, whether
they have Xbox Live integration or not, so
we’ll keep doing that with Creators Program
games—they’ll be assorted with every other
game. On console, though, players and
parents expect a curated store experience.
So, we’re maintaining that store experience
for them, and we’re putting the open,
uncurated Creators Program games in their
own section. We’re sort of saying, “here’s our
curated store, and here’s our uncurated
section.” It may seem less elegant than
solving the curation/discovery problem all
up, but I actually think it will give us the best
of both worlds, and address our desire to
make sure Xbox is truly an open platform,
while keeping the curation that our players
expect and like in the store.
And we will definitely have programmatic
promotion in the Creators Program section of
the store, with things such as collections for
new releases, top rated, et cetera. So
players will be able to see what’s popular.
Could a game move out of the Creator’s
program into ID@Xbox, or into the main
Store if it was doing well?
Absolutely. It could move from Creators to
ID@Xbox before it even releases. There are a
couple of back-end things we need to
address to make this happen on the tech
side, so let me put an asterisk there and say
“Absolutely… later this summer,” but
directionally, philosophically, absolutely!
We expect to see lots of ID submission that
have already started development and Live
implementation via Creators, and we expect
to see plenty of games launch in the
Creators Program and then hopefully come
through ID@Xbox later on. n
if you’d like to hear more about iD@xbox,
tweet charla at @iocat or visit the iD website
at www.xbox.com/en-GB/developers/id
051
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