Chris Charla loves to skateboard – and we (still) have the pics to prove it!
and no game is ever easy to ship. It’s
not something players think about and
probably shouldn’t think about, but from
my perspective, being a little bit on the
inside and knowing how much work these
development studios put in does give me a
different level of appreciation for them.With regards to your listening tour before
the launch of the Xbox One, what were the
biggest lessons that you learnt through
doing that?
Without question the biggest lesson that
we learned was that developers wanted
to self-publish and I think that Microsoft
really learned, and if you just look at what
we’ve done over the last few years, the more
open we’re able to be the better results for
developers and players. Honestly, nobody
would ever have expected that two brothers
from Canada who’ve never shipped a game
before would have put together Cuphead,
and I can tell you that 15 years ago it would
have been really hard for StudioMDHR to get
a dev kit from any console manufacturer.
Cuphead just never would have existed. But
it was because of a bunch of things coming
together, the democratisation of game
development, the tools that Unity, Unreal and
GameMaker provide, combined with platform
openness from Microsoft and others, that
enabled games like Cuphead to exist in the
world. And the world, to me, is such a better
place with games like Cuphead in it. I’m just
using that as an example, I could list 20 or 30
other games off the top of my head.Would you say there’s a lot of pressure as
director of the program?
I’ve never been asked that question before!
Yeah, I would say that everyone on the
team feels a lot of pressure. And it’s good
pressure, because if we mess up, we canHow does it feel to see 1,000 games published
through the program?
It feels awesome. I don’t want to take credit
for what developers are doing. The 1,000
games are there because there’s hundreds of
development teams working incredibly hard to
get the games on the platform and knowing
that we’re a small part of their journey to get
on Xbox feels amazing. I have an external
HDD and I have just about every game that’s
come through the ID@Xbox program on it. I
scroll through the list and see the icons of all
those games and know the story behind their
development. I know how hard that developer
worked or the struggles they overcame or
what cool innovation or progression in game
development that team realised.Does that unique insight offer you a special
perspective and allow you to appreciate those
games in a different way to most?
Absolutely. I used to be a game developerDIRECTOR OF THE ID@ XBOX PROGRAM CHRIS CHARLA TALKS TO US ABOUT
THE PRESSURES AND CHALLENGES OF BRINGING INDIE GAMES TO XBOX
060 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINEID@XBOX