On the eve of the ID@Xbox program’s 1000th game release, Stevivor sat down with its Director, Chris Charla, for a chat at PAX AUS.
“It’s been five years since we announced the program,” Charla said. “It feels great, like honestly. The first [release] was tricky. I think on a day-to-day basis — myself and the team — we’re heads down, we’re working with developers just trying to help ‘em out, make it easier to ship on Xbox either whether it’s improving things on our back-end.
“Hitting that 1,000 games milestone is just a really nice kind of moment to take a step back and say like, ‘ok, things are actually going pretty well, developers are having a lot of success on the platform both commercially and I think no question critically.’ They’re having good luck taking advantage of new platform initiatives like Xbox Game Pass and we feel good about where things are. Obviously we’re never going to slow down in terms of working but it feels pretty good right now.”
In the five years of its operation, Microsoft confirmed that ID@Xbox titles have been played for 4 billion cumulative hours, have amassed $1 billion USD in revenue and offer 4 billion potential Gamerscore. More than 3,000 studios from 67 countries around the world are currently making games for inclusion in the program — more than 1,600 games are in active development.
As for which ID@Xbox game is truly the program’s 1,000th will remain a bit of a mystery, Charla told Stevivor. One thing’s for sure, though — it’s available now.
“We actually have three games shiping on the same day so you can kind of take your pick of which of those is going to be number 1,000,” Charla said.
“It’s sometimes a little hard to count cuz like we have games that are in game preview so they’ve shipped but they’re not really 1.0 so do you count them? But yeah there’s gonna be three games shipping on next Wednesday [or Tuesday, Australian time].”
What’s your favourite ID@Xbox title? If you’d like to read more of the program and its successes, head over to Xbox Wire.
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