In an interview with Eurogamer, Chris Charla, head of ID@Xbox, has discussed what the indie development scene will need to do to work on Project Scarlett as soon as it launches next year more than what they currently do… which is nothing.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Chris Charla, head of ID@Xbox, discussed what the indie development scene needs to do to work on Project Scarlett as soon as it launches next year. As of right now, there’s not too much happening.
While he didn’t want to offer any comment about devkits being sent to Indie developers or they already had them, he did say that the platform will work seamlessly between current and next-gen. The developer kits should work as efficiently as they do for triple-A publishers.
It’s good to note that this was not always a given. Since Microsoft changed its policy between the golden age of Xbox 360 and Xbox One, it made it almost a nightmare for indie devs to work on the platform. This reason remains one of the reasons why many indie devs only work on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch.
“There are no plans to change it,” Charla said. “Our main goal at the start of the program is our main goal now, just to make life easy for indie developers – if we can make life easy for them and make getting onto the platform as easy as possible, then we’re gonna have lots of great content, we’re gonna have lots of diverse content, and players are gonna be happy. And that won’t change at all.”
Charla went on to say, “I don’t think we’re talking about dev kit availability right now. I apologize, I can’t amplify anything that was said about Scarlett more than what Phil talked about onstage.”
Also, Charla confirmed that backward compatibility would work for indie games as it does with triple-A titles. All of the games currently playable on the Xbox One will carry onto the Project Scarlett console as soon as it releases next year.
