ID@Xbox interview: ‘Discoverability is the biggest challenge for games today’

On August 20, 2013, then-Xbox vice president Phil Harrison announced the ID@Xbox programme at Gamescom.

Designed to make it easier for indie developers to release their games on Xbox consoles, ID@Xbox gave each registered developer two development kits, access to technical documentation and support from the Xbox team as needed.

It was decided that Chris Charla – who had a career in video games dating all the way back to 1995 when he was the first editor of IGN, then joined Xbox in 2010 to become the portfolio manager for Xbox Live Arcade – would direct the ID@Xbox programme.

11 years later, Charla is still in charge as senior director, so earlier this month when he was once again at Gamescom, we decided there was no better place to chat with him about the ID@Xbox programme – how it went before, how it’s going now and how the team plans to improve it going forwards.

It’s now been 11 years since the ID@Xbox programme was originally announced, and you’ve now been through nearly two console generations since then. How do you feel the program looks now, more than a decade later? Have you hit the targets you’d aimed for along the way, and are there more to be hit?

It’s a great question to ask and a really hard question to answer, because when we announced the program I was just like “I just want to get one to launch,” you know what I mean?

We were really focused on the fixing the challenges that devs were having on Xbox One, and making sure developers could self publish, and I felt so behind [it], and I think the whole team felt behind [it], because we knew independent developers were producing such amazing work and we were behind making sure that they could ship on Xbox.

So yeah, do I think we’ve met those goals? I do. I actually think we still have so much more to do, and it’s always a hard thing to balance, reflecting and saying “oh, we’ve come a really long way” without ignoring the fact that “oh, we have so much further to go”.

But I do think, when I sit back and reflect, I’m so proud of what developers have shipped on Xbox, and so proud of the ID@Xbox team and what they’ve done to enable that.

We’re at just around 5000 games that have shipped through the programme. Billions of dollars have been paid to independent developers, which feels like a really big number. And then, you know, millions and millions and millions of players around the world have gotten to experience these amazing games.

So it’s kind of hard for me to even imagine a world now where something like ID@Xbox doesn’t exist. When you see 20 games on the show floor from ID@Xbox devs, I think the next two booths down are ID@Xbox games, and some of the coolest moments at E3 and Summer Game Fest over the years have been ID@Xbox games.

And it’s been, like, a third of my professional career, or more. It’s a hard question. I have to start thinking about my whole life when you ask the question, but I’m so happy to see it and it’s definitely succeeded beyond our wildest expectations.

When you say there are still targets you want to hit, is discoverability among those? Because it feels like an ongoing struggle for some developers.

Yeah, absolutely. I think to me, and I’ve said this before, I think discoverability is the biggest challenge for games today, right? And not just how players discover games – because actually, I think our store is really good at showing you a lot of games that you’re really going to enjoy – but helping developers find their audience.

We have the internet today, we’re globally connected, and you see games that in the past maybe couldn’t have succeeded commercially, actually having commercial success now because the audience they can target is global.

But how do we help developers find that audience? So if you’re making, say, a niche game, which obviously is really cool, maybe there’s 200,000 people on Earth who want to play your game. How can we as Microsoft and Xbox help a developer find all 200,000 of them and get their game in front of all those people?

“If you’re making, say, a niche game, which obviously is really cool, maybe there’s 200,000 people on Earth who want to play your game. How can we as Microsoft and Xbox help a developer find all 200,000 of them and get their game in front of all those people?”

We can’t guarantee sales, but you know, if we can help get the game there? You know, we really think about the discovery challenge in two ways now, both in terms of making sure players see cool games, but also in terms of helping developers find their audience.

How lenient is your curation process? It’s often argued that stores like Steam, and to some extent other digital stores, seem to accept low quality SEO-baiting games. Is there a real attempt to have a higher bar with ID@Xbox?

It’s a really hard question to answer, because while I look at those other stores as a player and buy games, I can’t really… I focus so much on what we need to be doing better and what we need to do, that that’s 100% of my focus.

I will say that our team at Xbox – who look at games for curation in terms of: “What are the games that we want to make sure people are seeing? What are the games we want to feature in our Indie Selects programme? What are the games that are interesting and maybe we should show to the Game Pass team? What do we put on stage or show at a show?” – the team who does that work are some of the smartest, most skilled… not taste makers, but taste spotters on Earth.

I honestly think it’s literally some of the top 10 on Earth video game taste spotters, or whatever the word is for them.

And I’ve thought about this a lot, because I think sometimes about… there are however many billion people on the planet, but everybody on the planet is probably top 100 at something, right? You might be living in the mountains in Kazakhstan and you’re top 100 at knowing, you know, something rural or agrarian. But I think we have some people who are definitely in the high top 100 in being able to spot quality games.

Before ID@Xbox you were the portfolio manager for Xbox Live Arcade. Obviously the Xbox 360 Marketplace has recently closed down. Is it sad to see some of the stuff that you managed being no longer available?

It’s amazing that [on] that store you were still able to buy Xbox 360 games, 10+ years after we had really moved onto Xbox One, you know, two generations ago now.

And so, as sad as it is on one hand, it’s also pretty impressive that we kept the store going as long as we did.

And yeah, emotionally… I still like to turn on the 360 and look at the Marketplace and see all these early 2010s fashions for the avatar items and stuff. And of course, everybody can still download everything, everybody had plenty of notice to buy everything, including a few games that are very difficult to acquire otherwise.

Further reading

8

Xbox boss would ‘love to find solutions’ so games aren’t lost when the 360 store closes

Phil Spencer says “preservation is front and centre when all these decisions are made”

But I think the emotion we all collectively felt when the store closed down… I know when we stopped selling Xbox Live Indie Games [in 2017], I bought so many that day that my credit card started to get rejected and I actually had to just go buy store cards so I could buy more of them, because I was just buying everything.

I know that emotion that we all feel when that store closed down, and the warm feelings we have for the Xbox, that’s the reason that game preservation is so important. And you’ve seen Sarah Bond talk about this, and the amount of support she has internally from all of team Xbox about game preservation and making sure that your library moves with you.

And even though I don’t play A Kingdom for Keflings that often, you know what I mean, it’s just nice to know – whether it’s on my 360 or on my other Xboxes – that I can play it, it’s a good feeling.

So is the hope, then, that from the Xbox One generation onwards the quest for backwards compatibility will no longer be a thing and we’ll never have to see games being lost like that again? Because the Xbox Series X/S felt like a natural upgrade and it still supported practically all Xbox One games, so presumably the successor to the Series X/S will do the same?

We’re absolutely… you know, I have no idea what the future is going to bring.

But when you see the attention that we’ve put on game preservation, you can imagine that that is not a one-off thing, it’s going to continue to be important to us in the future.

“When you see the attention that we’ve put on game preservation, you can imagine that that is not a one-off thing, it’s going to continue to be important to us in the future.”

I was at BitSummit recently and noticed that a lot of the indie games on display are coming to Xbox. Asia (and Japan in particular) has been something that Xbox has been trying and trying to crack over the years. Is progress being made there?

Yeah, absolutely. I think progress with developers in Asia bringing their games to Xbox is going well.

Again, we still have lots of work to do, but when you look at the work of somebody like Isao Murayama, who leads the ID@Xbox programme in Japan, or Jun Shen Chia who leads our dev efforts in Southeast Asia, Arjun [Varma] who’s in India, we’re working really hard to make sure that those devs understand the worldwide opportunity of Xbox and making sure – and again, lots of work to do – but making sure it’s easy for them.

Our goal is to make sure it’s as easy for a dev in Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Japan, or India to make a game for Xbox as it is for a dev in the United States, or Germany or the UK. We have work to do there, but that’s what we’re working on.

And I think when devs see the success of games like Palworld, they start to understand the worldwide opportunity that Xbox can bring.

Speaking of Palworld, did you see that coming? Because it felt like it came out of nowhere but if you guys are working with development teams throughout the process, was there any way you could have predicted its success?

I predicted the sales to a unit. [laughs] No. You know, I mentioned Isao Murayama and he’s a huge fan of Craftopia and Pocketpair, and worked really hard to help them bring Palworld to Xbox.

What we knew was it was going to be a really good game. It had good Steam wishlists, there were a lot of things that told us this game was going to be really good and was going to perform well, but I think when a game blows up like that, that’s very, very difficult to predict.

It’s obviously been a difficult time for the industry, and Xbox hasn’t escaped that. With your dealings with developers around the world, do you see this affecting the smaller studios as well, or in your experience does it tend to be the larger companies with larger budgets who are now suffering the most losses?

I think tough times affect everybody in the industry. It’s been really interesting because what it hasn’t affected is the quality of games, or even the number of games that are coming to Xbox. When we look at the number of new submissions of games for Xbox, or the quality of those games, or the innovation, or the progression, that hasn’t slowed down at all.

So it’s definitely been tough times for the last 12-18 months for a lot of developers and publishers, but for the players… I’ll just say that that toughness has not affected the quality of the output of the industry.