Microsoft is using this week"s Games Developers Conference to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its ID@Xbox indie games development and publishing program. The service was actually first announced at GamesCom on August 20, 2013, so Microsoft is celebrating its 10th birthday a few months early.
In a blog post today, Chris Charla, the head of ID@Xbox, said that since the announcement in 2013, over 3,000 games have been published under the program. Those games have earned a total of over $4 billion for the developers that made those games. Among those titles are acclaimed indie games like Inside, Cuphead, Dead Cells, Hades, Untitled Goose Game, and many more. At the moment, there are over 5,000 developers in over 100 countries that are working on over 3,000 upcoming games for ID@Xbox.
The program continues to expand, including today"s news on the ID@Xbox Developer Acceleration Program for game creators with more diverse backgrounds. While the program has mostly been a digital game exclusive service, Charla stated today that Microsoft currently has a pilot program that is letting ID@Xbox games be released in physical versions. That program will be expanded in the near future.
Finally, Charla stated that Microsoft plans to launch a new process that should make it easier for new developers to contact someone at the Xbox division. He said:
Meeting partners new and old and looking at games is one of the most amazing parts of getting to work on a program like ID@Xbox, and we’re never going to slow that down. But to ensure all developers get equal access to decision makers at Xbox, and to provide faster feedback to developers on concepts submitted – especially for Game Pass deal evaluations – we’re going to be launching a new process that provides a template that has all the info developers need to submit a concept for deal consideration, and that will be looked at by the key decision makers from our Game Pass, business development, ID@Xbox and Portfolio teams.
Again, more info on this new process will be revealed in the near future.