Microsoft confirm indie self-publishing on Xbox One

Microsoft have confirmed that indie developers will be able to self-publish with Xbox One, Polygon reports. While all the details have not been revealed, Microsoft promise more to come at Gamescom.

Marc Whitten, corporate vice president of Microsoft said “every Xbox One can be used for development…every game and experience can take advantage of all of the features of Xbox One and Xbox LIVE. This means self-publishing, and since it’s a game, it’s a little more complicated than figuring out how to self publish a book. This means Kinect, the cloud, achievements. This means great discoverability on Xbox LIVE. We’ll have more details on the program and the timeline at Gamescom in August.”

Whitten admitted to Polygon that “it won’t all be there at launch.” Microsoft have a plan moving forward for indie-development on Xbox One, but that support will be rolled out in phases. These phases will likely include a beta and publicly discussing policies.

Whitten also said that the self publishing policy for indie-developers wasn’t a reversal of previous intentions or last minute change in response to what Sony are doing with PS4, but rather inherent to the Xbox One’s design.

“This has been why we built a bunch of how the architecture works. The idea that you can develop against a production Xbox Live service. That’s why we architected that. We wanted to make it easier for all types of games and content creators to take advantage of the platform and Partnernet and Dev kits could never scale” Whitten said.

Whitten added that he was excited by the prospects of indie-self publishing and the raft of games that will potentially be released, “I get excited by what really creative people will do when they think about Smartglass, Kinect and our Live services. Some will be small quirky and fun and some will be huge, epic and creative like Minecraft.”