Microsoft has recently announced its plans of giving more people reins over the kind of content that pops up in both the Xbox Store and the Windows Store. It has been the concern of many that the Xbox platform doesn’t offer nearly as much Indie games as its main competitor, PlayStation. The latter has been offered a pretty varied selection of Indie titles that were are appreciated and enhance the overall PS experience, and the kind of games its consumers have access to.
The way Microsoft is looking to bring that kind of environment to its Xbox platform is through the new Xbox Live Creators Program. This is a tool that developers will be able to use to quickly and easily create games for Microsoft’s ecosystem. The basic idea behind is that anyone that wants to create a game for the Xbox or Windows 10 platform can fire up their Xbox console and do just that.
With this initiative, Xbox might bring back an important Indie component which had established a solid presence when Xbox 360 was current-gen. The new Creators Program will work coupled with Microsoft’s ID@Xbox, giving it another important perk from a publishing point of view.
Using the tool will probably be free, but gaining access to it in the beginning will cost eager developer. The entry fee isn’t outrageous, as it can only reach $100 at most. That being said, it could only be as small as $20, which would be great.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out for Microsoft, but expectations are already forming and many are expecting Microsoft’s gaming platforms to see a flood of new indie games coming in the near future. Here, we’re talking about both the Xbox Store and Windows Store, as one of the requirements that developers will have to respect is making games for the UWP, which is the Universal Windows Platform. This is another one of Microsoft’s initiatives that would see the Xbox environment and Windows 10 PCs be able to communicate so their users can play together.
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