really negatively impact a lot of developers
that are really putting their livelihoods on the
line to develop games for our platform and our
players. We feel a great amount of pressure
to do the best for our developers and for our
players. So yeah, we’re highly motivated to do
the right thing for our devs and our players.
Have there ever been any big challenges that
you’ve come across?
Absolutely, challenges come up literally every
single day and they’re always different. We
have devs who are interested in pushing
the boundaries of business models and
Microsoft has certain policies, so we need
to re-evaluate, that sort of thing. Things
like crossplay with other systems. That’s
something that came up and was honestly a
challenge, like, wow, interesting, let’s figure
it out and see how we can do it. The next
thing you know you’re playingRocket League
with somebody on the Nintendo Switch. Or
mundane challenges where a developeraccidentally deletes their shipping build
two days before the game was supposed
to launch and you have to think about how
you’re going to help out there. All sorts of
things come up that keep things interesting.Are there times someone signs up and they
don’t deliver, and how do you manage that?
Yeah, that actually does happen and that’s
just life, that’s just game development. A
team has started on a game and it’ll be in
development and the game for whatever
reason isn’t coming together, or the team
has problems and they need to cease
development and that’s just life. We don’tget stressed out about it at all. We feel bad,
obviously. If somebody is trying to accomplish
something and they don’t, there’s nothing
that you can do about that. In the creative
industry there is always going to be more
projects started than are completed.You’ve hit a huge milestone at 1,000 games,
but where does ID@Xbox go from here?
It’s something we ask ourselves all the time.
We just had a summit, where we brought all
the ID folks from UK, US and Asia to talk about
where the program’s going and how we can
grow and innovate and progress and I look at
what’s out there and I just see that there’s
still just so much we can do for developers
and players. I don’t think the job’s half done
and so we’re just going to keep going. I don’t
see us slowing down any time soon. I love the
1,000-game milestone because it’s a good
point for us to take a step back and look at
what’s happened in the last five years, and it
feels great. But honestly it’s getting back to
work, nose to the grindstone, and keep going.
It’s hard for me to explain without sounding
like I’m bragging but the job that we all do is
so satisfying and so much fun, to work with
these devs and see what’s coming and be a
part of it in a small way.“I look at what’s out there and I
see there’s still so much we can
do for developers and players”
More Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 061