Which recently, hit an impressive 1,000 game milestone. According to Chris, since the program began over five years ago the overall goal hasn’t changed. Nor will it in the future. And that is, to make the process of releasing a game on the Xbox platform, for an independent developer, as easy as it could possibly be. Which is where our conversation began.


AusGamers: What’s the typical process behind an independent developer coming to the programme with a new game. Is that now fully streamlined? How is the team set up at Microsoft?

Chris Charla: It is pretty streamlined. We’ve spent years just working on getting things to be as smooth as possible for developers, and I think there's always improvements we can make and we're constantly working on it - but it's in a pretty smooth place now. They apply, we get them into the program, get them two dev kits at no cost. They know what game they're making and then, really, for them it’s off to the races. They also get access to all the white papers, developer documentation, whatever is coming down the pike. Whether it's the Xbox Adaptive Controller, or other hardware, Xbox Game Preview, or Game Pass - which has been big in the last year.

And then, we're not super involved during the actual development. We don't have producers, or anything like that. As they get closer to shipping, then we get more involved in terms of helping them through certification, how to get ratings and then promotion. Whether it's stuff on our blog or releasing videos or being part of a show with us, that kind of thing. That's when we start to get really involved and then the game ships and hopefully does super-well and everybody's happy.

AusGamers: Is there any obligation then, on the part of the developer? It sounds like with Microsoft providing the dev kits and all this initial support and then pre-release support as the release date gets closer - what happens to a title if it doesn't quite make it that far?

Chris: No, there's no real obligation. Developers want to ship their games and we all understand the realities of development. There are games that have started development on Xbox and then for one reason or another the game is cancelled, or the team breaks up or that kind of thing. That happens, but it doesn't happen that often. And so, it's not something we stress about at all.


Ashen
AusGamers: In terms of on-boarding, do you guys go through design docs or preview builds or anything like that?

Chris: Yeah, there's kind of two gates that a game needs to get through to ship on Xbox One. The first one is concept approval. And that's really a very light look, where we just look to make sure that what the person wants to bring is console quality. So, if what they want to bring is not really a game, it's like a soundboard that plays donkey noises, there's other places for that. And if you look at the breadth of games that are on Xbox One, you understand exactly how broad we want it to be. We're not at all looking to be censors or anything like that.

And then towards the end of development, games do need to go through certification and that's just to make sure that they behave in a consistent way that players expect so that if you unplug the controller, it's going to tell you that, if you are saving it, it's going to be a cloud save as well as a local save, those kinds of things. And I think certification is something that, I know from my time as a developer - it scares people when they hear the word.

AusGamers: Yeah.

Chris: Whether it's certification or, it's called different names on other platforms. But we try and make it as straightforward as possible and try and make it so developers get through that process as quickly as possible. And we don't stress out if a game fails once or twice or three times. It's not like we get mad or anything like that. The only thing that bums us is if a dev has launch plans and a game keeps failing cert over and over again.

AusGamers: Yeah, that would be bad.

Chris: They start to run out of time to announce their launch date or have to push the launch date back and again we're not mad, but we get bummed out if it starts to impact their business. So, we'll work with them as much as we can to really drill into issues and see what it could be that's holding things up.


Tunic
AusGamers: In terms of support and being an intermediary between the Xbox technical teams, when it comes to things like Xbox One X 4K support or any issues with working with hardware and hitting performance - how does your team work alongside developers?

Chris: Right, so we also have a support team that works with developers and it can escalate all the way up to, like with any other developer, publisher, all the way up to the folks who design the hardware. If they need to. I will say that with the advent of development tools like Unity and Unreal, the typical game that comes through the ID program doesn’t run into very many issues like that. Most of the support questions are really about certification, they’re not about performance or anything like that – which the way it was about 10 or 15 years ago. That said, there are always games that are trying to push the envelope or where the developers encounter a bug or unique situation and we get whoever we need to, to help out.

AusGamers: 1000 titles. That's such a huge library. How is the team positioned within the Xbox ecosystems in terms of the market place? It seems like, with 1000 titles it feels that ID@Xbox could use its own store page, its own tab, or even its own separate sales or separate promotion.

Chris: That's an interesting point. At Xbox we took the view for Xbox One that a game is a game and so all the games are assorted together regardless of whether they came from an independent developer or a huge publisher. But at the same time, we also knew that games from independent developers, typically they're gonna have a smaller marketing budget. They're going to have fewer resources. This is a place where we see that Microsoft can step up. Bring some of our resources to bear, to amplify the promotional work that those guys are doing.

AusGamers: Definitely.

Chris: So, if you look at the Microsoft Store on Xbox there is an ID@Xbox section as you start to scroll down between new releases and the top free and top paid titles. We also do some unique ID@Xbox promotions on a yearly basis where we'll do, a big promotion in the spring and a big promotion in the winter and a big promotion in the summer. They're ID@Xbox only, for independent developers. And when we do theme sales and things like that, we try to specifically highlight games from independent developers.


Warhammer: Vermintide II
The other thing we do, is a really good job of working to make sure that when you open the store you see content that's going to be interesting to you that is both diverse and varied. So, what you see when you open the store is going to be a little different than what I see based on what we've both played and what we already own. And then the other thing that I think has been, in the last year, a really interesting new discovery tool - Xbox Game Pass.

AusGamers: I think Game Pass, just based on, once first party titles were added, has grown into a must have service for Xbox owners. There’s such a huge library of diverse titles.

Chris: A lot of those games come from independent developers and we've seen some interesting things where folks who might not have taken a risk on a 20-dollar game or even a 10-dollar game, but when its available as part of the Game Pass they're like - I'll download it. And then play it. We see that subscribers play a lot more games overall than before they were members. We curate what goes into Game Pass and spend a lot of time doing that to make sure it's a good collection.

Also, when Achievements show up on the Community Hub or people they start streaming, when you think about how Game Pass works, you might think that a game going into Game Pass would see sales decline. Because, hey, people who might be buying a game can just get it as part of Game Pass. What we see sometimes though, is that Game Pass turns into this interesting discovery tool for a wide audience to find out about games. It's been like a fascinating thing to watch. Game Pass is still new, so we're still calculating, compiling data, to see how it works. But I think that over the next couple of years, it will become a bigger and bigger discovery tool for us as players.


AusGamers: With the ID@Xbox team expanding and Microsoft investing in actual studios and bringing developers on as first party. Is that going to expand the curation role within your team to focus on trying to bring more to the Game Pass service?

Chris: That is something that we're doing. At E3 we announced a few titles that we're going to be shipping, day and date when they launch - through Xbox Game Pass. Obviously all first party games do that now, all the games from Microsoft Studios do, but we saw a good opportunity for some indie games that add variety, for Xbox to take advantage of that as well. And so, a few have shipped so far, and there's lots more coming. We think it can be something powerful for both developers and for players too. So, we're excited to lean into it, share all our learnings with devs and figure out what the right next steps are to take.

AusGamers: Some of the bigger Indie titles like Ashen and Cuphead. People might be surprised to learn that Microsoft isn't listed as the publisher. How involved are you in projects of that scale - like Ashen and Cuphead?

Chris: We encounter games in a bunch of different ways. The person who discovered Cuphead at Microsoft was just on a dev forum, saw a question that Chad or Jared posted, saw a couple of screenshots and was like ‘this is amazing!’. We have a great publishing arm with Microsoft Studios, but for ID@Xbox we just see these cool games, whether it's Ashen or Cuphead, and we're like ‘the world needs to know about this’.


Cuphead
Really, we're there just to promote those games and to celebrate them. The other thing that we know is, we don't know about everything that’s out there. Games change radically during development and so before E3 or GDC or any time when we're going to be featuring a lot of games, we email everybody, we don't just email the titles we marked as cool titles. Which we have a field, ‘cool title’. We email everybody who's in the programme, all 3000 plus developers everyone's always surprised because we email months in advance. The email about E3 will go out in December or January. It’s like, ‘E3's coming, if you want to participate, we need a video by such and such date and let us know if you can be in L.A. or if you can't that’s fine too’. We can never include everybody that wants to be included, but we always make sure that everybody's got an opportunity to pitch and to be included in those kinds of events.

AusGamers: Nice.

Chris: Everyone in the team cherishes those moments when you see a thing and you're like, ‘what is this?’. We've also had this happen - where a developer sends a video and it looks good but not quite ready. Then E3 comes around and they send another video, where it looks good but again not right now. Then the next GDC rolls around and it’s like, ‘Man, this is the third time. I just want these guys to win, but it's not quite up there with everything else’. Then you get to the next E3 video review and it's there for the fourth time. But this time, it looks amazing. And that's totally happened, where a game has made it into a show on their fourth go around - which is great. Power to them for showing it early and having the conviction to not give up.

AusGamers: Game development in terms of schedules seem to be very different for indies because that term covers such a broad range of different. How do you guys manage or track a portfolio of games that are in development that you know you may not see more of for another year or two years or three years? Ashen we saw in 2015, and it’s finally getting released in 2018.

Chris: We track them, we stay in touch with the developers. We typically, probably know a little bit more than we can talk about publicly. Then the number one thing we do is try not to stress out about it. Cuphead is a good example where, right now if you ask anybody about Cuphead what they say is - Cuphead was amazing. Nobody says it was in development a long time. But before it came out, I was afraid to wear a Cuphead shirt at work because people were gonna to be like - where is it? If a developer has the runway to keep working on a game, they should work on it for as long as they want. They may get a lot of stuff from Microsoft along the way but what they're never going to get is pressure to ship on a certain date.


Void Bastards
AusGamers: Switching gears, mouse and keyboard support coming to Xbox One. Do you see that opening the door to more ID@Xbox titles that could look and feel completely different? Do you see that as an untapped market to integrate a different style of indie game into the Xbox ecosystem?

Chris: It's hard to say. I think to me what it's about is giving developers choices. What we find is that, and we've seen this over the last five years since the Xbox One launch, is that every time we're open and give developers choices it pays off for players and it pays off for us. And so, whether that was enabling cross-play so that an Xbox One can plays with a Switch, or a PC – it has always worked out. Mouse and keyboard support is another example of that. I think that as a developer, the one thing you should know about Xbox is that everybody's got a controller - so shipping a game where you want it to be exclusively mouse and keyboard.

AusGamers: Might be a bit tricky.

Chris: Exactly. That said, I love text adventures. And somebody was like ‘I want to share a text adventure on Xbox One through ID@Xbox but it requires a keyboard’.

AusGamers: Different genres can appeal to different audiences. And there probably is an audience for a keyboard-specific game like a text adventure or something that’s more of a throwback to the PC strategy game era from 1990s.

Chris: Definitely. We don't want to be prescriptive about it. I do think I would remind developers that every Xbox comes with a controller, but we'll see what happens. That would be interesting.

Thanks to Chris Charla for his time and to the team at Xbox Australia.