Sony's PlayStation 4 won the popular vote at E3 for many reasons, one of them being its emphatic support of indie developers.
Microsoft's policies alienated those same developers, though, and it seems the backlash has caused the company to rethink its policies.
In addition to allowing self-publishing, Microsoft is looking at a new certification process similar to Apple's, with a 14-day turnaround, and it turns out that every Xbox One console can be used as a development unit as well, rather than devs requiring special hardware.
"Our vision is that every person can be a creator," Xbox Chief Product Officer Marc Whitten said in a statement published by Hryb. "That every Xbox One can be used for development. That every game and experience can take advantage of all of the features of Xbox One and Xbox Live."
"This means self-publishing," he continued. "This means Kinect, the cloud, achievements. This means great discoverability on Xbox LIVE. We'll have more details on the program and the timeline at Gamescom in August."
That's another big shift for Microsoft, and once again it's not unwelcome.
Microsoft is to allow independent games developers to self-publish on its Xbox One games console, in a reversal of its previous policy.
"Indies" will be able to create their own games, publish to the Xbox when they like, and set their own pricing, the computer giant has confirmed.
Microsoft had previously said it would only allow games from recognised publishers on the new console.
The Xbox One, the successor to the Xbox 360, is to be launched in November.
Announcing the policy change Marc Whiten, corporate vice president of Xbox, said: "Our vision is that every person can be a creator. That every Xbox One can be used for development. That every game and experience can take advantage of all of the features of Xbox One and Xbox Live. This means self-publishing."
Microsoft plans to make further announcements about self-publishing in August at the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany.
The self-publishing U-turn is the first major announcement since Don Mattrick, former boss of the Xbox division, left to be head of games maker Zynga in July.
Development costs
Reacting to the announcement, Will Freeman, editor of Develop, a magazine for the games developer industry, told the BBC: "This is certainly an exciting move by Microsoft and will help democratise games development.
"But making a game is one thing, getting it played by lots of people is another. What really matters is Microsoft's policy towards distribution."
Barry Meade, commercial director of Fireproof Studios, a British Bafta-award-winning games maker, said: "This will be great for diversity, good for Microsoft and good for consoles in general.
"There hasn't been enough innovation in the console sector because of the high costs of development."
Fireproof has been highly critical of console makers in the past, principally because of the high costs and bureaucracy involved in creating games for them, preferring to focus on the cheaper mobile and browser platforms.
Creating a blockbuster console game from scratch and getting it promoted in stores and online can cost tens of millions of dollars, whereas Fireproof's popular mobile game, The Room, cost up to £80,000, says Mr Meade.
Self-publishing
Microsoft's original policy contrasted with that of console rival, Sony, which is seen by many developers as more "indie-friendly".
In May, Sony announced that it would introduce an indie game section in its PlayStation Store and allow self-publishing on the Playstation 4 console, also due for its UK launch in November.
In June, Microsoft stopped charging developers for updating their games on the Xbox 360 in a sign that it was responding to criticism from the indie community.
it also makes a lot of sense. The Xbox 360 barely has an operating system as such things are reckoned. The Xbox One, in contrast, contains all the elements of a modern PC and runs a variant of Windows 8 on top of that. The barriers to compiling and running code directly on the console are much smaller — with 8GB of RAM and an eight-core CPU there’s no intrinsic reason you couldn’t develop for the Xbox One directly on the Xbox One (assuming Microsoft allowed it).
Indie developers respond
According to Retro City Rampage developer Brian Provinciano, however, the news, while welcome, still doesn’t put Sony and Microsoft on an even footing. Provinciano states that Microsoft is still treating Xbox One indie developers like second class citizens, requiring them to use the Windows 8 Store — something a lot of people aren’t willing to bet on at the moment (for some good reasons). He also made comments about Sony allowing developers to harness the full power of the PS4 as compared to Microsoft, implying that Xbox Live indie developers may not have full access to hardware resources — but that’s unclear.
From our perspective, this is a unilateral good move. Microsoft’s comments make it clear that the company is aware just how tarnished its reputation is in the indie community; multiple developers have described working with Microsoft as nightmarish and the company had, until recently, required $10,000 payments if a developer wished to patch a game. The company apparently wants to address this going forward, saying that while it’ll test for major game-breaking bugs, it won’t require programmers to submit to such detailed code analysis or lengthy approval processes (the stated goal is a 14-day turnaround).
It’s fair to ask whether these changes are going to go far enough to repair Microsoft’s tattered reputation with developers, but unlike the first reversal, where the company threw out the popular Family Sharing concept along with a need for 24-hour check-ins, I don’t think there’s a downside here. Kudos to Microsoft for making another difficult choice in the name of building a better end product. The program may or may not need further tweaking, but the important thing is, Redmond really is listening.
