After the Xbox One event Microsoft came under a lot of criticism from the indie community, the 360 already was not a particularly friendly indie platform and there had been no mention of any type of support for game developers for the new system.
Don Mattrick today announced that the Xbox One will have tools specifically for indie developers, have a look at what he had to say below.
“We’re going to have an independent creator program,” he said. “We’re going to sponsor it. We’re going to give people tools. That is something we think—I think—is important. That’s how I started in the industry. There’s no way we’re going to build a box that doesn’t support that.”
“Indie creators exist right inside our ecosystem, probably the best example of a huge success is Minecraft. The work that Notch did [was] pretty amazing in the PC space.”
Microsoft shot themselves in the foot by not saying these things when they first announced the console, by focusing on other aspects but games it has given people a very negative opinion of the system. This could have been easily avoided by outright announcing these things at the Xbox One event, it would have been very easy to extend the event by an hour, one hour to please the family aspects and the other for gamers and developers. This would have allayed a lot of peoples fears and satisfied them much more than the current “wait for E3” line.
Let me know in the comments what you think about this whole situation, it is very clear that Microsoft definitely could have handled it better.
