Indie Fast Lane Chris Charla

With the Id@xbox Program About to Help Its 500th Indie Game Into the Store, We Speak to Chris Charla, Head of Id@xbox, About What Comes Next 

- Stephen Ashby

The indie game has come a long way since Xbox Live first launched, from tiny games that only a few had heard of to breakout success stories that rival even the biggest mainstream games. You don’t need a team of hundreds to make a great game. Enter ID@Xbox, a programme that helps hundreds of small-scale developers get their games on Xbox One and in front of an audience of millions for everyone to enjoy. We speak to Chris Charla, the man responsible for bringing the likes of Inside, Oxen free and soon Cuphead to your console, to learn what’s in store for fans of indie gaming.

The ID@Xbox program has grown hugely since it launched. What do you see as its biggest successes, and success stories?

It’s been awesome to see the program grow since we announced it in 2013. We hit 500 games that have shipped via the program by the end of April, and that’s kind of a cool milestone! When we started the program we said we wanted to provide developers with a sustainable ecosystem and marketplace, and thanks to our players, we’ve really done that. Obviously, videogames are a hit-driven business, and not every game is a hit, but developers have made hundreds of millions of dollars through ID and it feels awesome to be a little part of that. It also means players have bought millions of ID games, and they’re getting to enjoy all this diverse content. So, successful devs and happy players is definitely the biggest success!

Of course, commercial success is really important, too, but there’s a lot of kinds of success – critical, personal, creative. And there have been some great success stories in the program that aren’t just commercial, where a dev has said “I had this idea, and I was able to ship it on Xbox, and that means a huge amount to me,” and that’s equally as awesome as some of the commercial successes we’ve seen.