XBox Live Creators Program

stofStorm

Hey peeps

Thought I would share this piece of news:

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/games/xbox/xboxlive/creator

I am quite exited by this, although I am not sure if this will lead to a very flooded XBox Live market. Any thoughts?

edg3

I am also excited - just feel I should wait for people to have some success before attempting to use it (nothing personally planned for it yet, starting this up will make tones attempt to make use of it hence I would need a fantastic reason to use it).

Especially for of the Xbox Live capabilities.

roguecode

stofStorm said:

although I am not sure if this will lead to a very flooded XBox Live market. Any thoughts?

This isn't much different to the open Xbox store that they launched before. So that may lead to a more flooded store, but it won't be because those titles can now have leaderboards etc. IMO.

EvanGreenwood

stofStorm said:

although I am not sure if this will lead to a very flooded XBox Live market. Any thoughts?

I'm not certain what the rules were with the store previously. @roguecode says this isn't much different to what came before. I wrote down my guesses anyway.

On the XBox One store these games will be shown as "Creator's Games". It looks like it's a case of anyone can get on, and as a result users are unlikely to have much confidence in those games and are going to stop browsing them if they see a few games they don't think are very good there.

XBox will likely elevate the games they think are excellent (or the ones that have risen above the others through sales) to being part of their closely curated actual store.

I guess that makes it no different to the AppStore, or going through Steam Greenlight (as it currently stands). Except initially your game is put in a folder essentially labelled "Probably Not Very Good".

But it is an opportunity to put your game on the XBox One. I don't know what the "simplified certification process" is or how much it costs, but I expect it's a lot easier and cheaper than what exists on Playstation.

Anyone know what the simplified certification process is?

roguecode

@EvanGreenwood, as far as I understand, this is basically just an SDK on top of the existing UWP store publishing stuff. So it lets you add XBL stuff, but doesn't make any difference to publishing.

Publishing on Xbox is available right now as a UWP app, and I don't remember there being any distinction in the store between "went through big cert" and "went UWP way".
The UWP way is done the same way as you publish to the Windows and Windows mobile stores. You submit the app, check the boxes for which platforms you want (desktop/mobile/xbox/holo lens), and then it goes through a cert process. It is MUCH easier than Apple's cert, and when I was publishing stuff there we could get an update out in a matter of hours.

On the other hand, the ID@XBOX (and AAA title) way, which I assume is much like PS4, is a full cert program with the big list of rules and tests etc.
ID@XBOX also gives you free devkits though.

jackshiels

EvanGreenwood said:

Anyone know what the simplified certification process is?

I'm not sure if it will be publicly available. It's generally all under NDA.