- In an interview with Kotaku, Microsoft unveiled that it paid out $1.7 billion to indie developers since 2013 through the ID@Xbox program
One of Microsoft’s most underrated developer partnership programs is ID@Xbox. Through the ID@Xbox program, Microsoft has paid independent developers more than $1.7 billion since 2013. This figure was revealed by ID@Xbox director Chris Charla in an interview with Kotaku.
In the past few years, the ID@Xbox program also grew substantially. It went from a three-person operation to a core group within Microsoft’s Xbox division.
“When we first started, it was… two or three people in a three-meter by three-meter space,” said Charla in the interview. “We were packed in and just getting things going. We knew exactly where we wanted to get to, which was to have devs have it as easy as possible to have their games shipped on Xbox One. We had an enormous amount of work to do at the beginning.”
Ever since the program launched, it enabled the Xbox One to see a number of independent games grow in popularity such as Cuphead and Ori and the Blind Forest.
So far, over 1,000 titles have been published on Xbox One.
