Last week, Jez Corden stated in his Xbox Two podcast that he had heard that Microsoft was expanding, and not limiting, their deals for 3rd party games in this year. It turns out we made a mistake in reporting that rumor.
The mistake was reporting that as a rumor, as it turned out he saw it firsthand. In a report for Windows Central, Jez shared the latest initiatives that Microsoft’s ID@Xbox program was working on to bring more games to Xbox, and to bring those Xbox games, to more places around the world.
The big new initiative is Xbox’s Global Expansion Team, which is a smaller team under ID@Xbox. As the ID@Xbox program itself was set up to connect Microsoft with smaller independent game developers and studios, their Global Expansion Team was set up for the express purpose of reaching out to developers from across the globe.
You can see the need for such a program when considering the latest indies that were shown to Jez. They had three ID@Xbox games that were not from the Global Expansion, one of which, Still Wakes The Deep, had a good showing in last year’s Xbox Partner Preview.
Microsoft could very much only work with small indie developers in America. But the same way that Sony realized the potential of game studios in China and Korea, Microsoft saw that there was budding talent around the world. The motivation to be venturesome in seeking these games out was very much validated.
ID@Xbox showed off five games from the Global Expansion, but they had impressive stats to bring up too. Agnes Kim, who heads the Global Expansion team, revealed that they have 100 + developers onboard on ID@Xbox thanks to the program.
Agnes explains:
“Our goal is to find awesome developers from what we call ‘expansion regions. These regions tend to be… expansion markets where we might not traditionally have found a lot of developers organically. We cover Southeast Asia, India, Latin America…
“We are a relatively new team. We started two years ago; half my team hit their two-year anniversary just recently. The… genesis of this team being established was because we felt like we weren’t doing justice for those developers. We felt like we needed to make a proactive effort. We needed to go out there.”
Agnes also reveals a surprising factor in Xbox’s indie initiatives: time. With the Global Expansion Team having worked for two years, most of the games that their devs and studios are working on aren’t ready to release.
Yes, unfortunately, independent game development has many of the same issues more large scale game development has when it comes to development time. But most of them likely won’t take as long as Team Cherry has on Hollow Knight: Silksong.
If it feels like Microsoft has had too many games percolating in the background, it all points to an eventual game development boiling point. Eventually, all of these games are going to be releasing, seemingly all at the same time, and it may be too overwhelming for even Xbox’s most faithful to follow.
It turns out indies will be part of that development boiling point too. And this could all turn out to be incredible or a disaster, but there’s something exciting about looking forward to what happens next. There really is nothing in the industry right now like Xbox.
