GamesBeat: What does dev mode on Xbox mean for developers? Do you expect that to bring in more indie devs and make that a more available platform?
Spencer: I don’t know if it will necessarily bring in more indie game devs, mainly because we have so many now. [Director of ID@Xbox Chris Charla] and the team at ID have done a good job. When teams needed dev kits, we sent out dev kits. We have thousands of indie studios building games. It seems like you can’t go a week without a few of them launching. We did our indie showcase at GDC. It’s not because I don’t want to embrace indie game devs coming in. I just think they’ve figured out how to navigate the territory.
What we’re likely to see is a lot of apps. When Apple TV opened up the app store on their fourth version this last year, there was some excitement around that. Then I looked at our Xbox base and how big it is relative to that base. I said, “We should have an open app platform.” If I’m a creator and I build a weather app, a home automation app, a traffic app — [there are] a bunch of cool scenarios that app developers will go off and drive. Instead of sending dev kits out, we just figured out how to turn every Xbox into a dev kit.
My expectation is that the app category will grow. Like with any app store, you’ll have some vertical things. Somebody builds things for a specific widget or scenario in their home. Then, I think you’ll have other things that are like stock tickers, or news feeds that get fed in an interesting way. That’s what I’m hoping for.
We teased this almost three years ago. Our problem was that the app model on Xbox was proprietary to us. We call it SRA, shared resource application. Those are the apps that, if you were going to go build a Netflix or YouTube app, you would build. We had to handhold you. We didn’t have a good dev platform. It wasn’t integrated into Visual Studio and all the tools developers would use. Or it was, but it was kind of a duct tape and baling wire thing.
We stepped back and said, “If app developers really want to target tens of millions of TVs, we should have it work like building any other application.” The reason we waited so long was because I wanted to get UWP to a point where I could say, “Hey, Windows developers, the millions of you that are already out there, instead of having to learn something else to put your app on Xbox, we’ve just moved Xbox over, so it supports the apps you’re already building.”
We’ll see the app traffic pick up. I’m excited to see what people build. We’ll see some interesting things. We’ll probably see some games. But I expect the bigger interest will be from app developers who’ve wanted to get to television at scale. We’re going to offer a scale television platform that I don’t see in the other ecosystems right now, given the number of users and the engagement we have.
GamesBeat: This is different from ID, right? That’s the better route to go make a game.
Spencer: That’s a great question. ID@Xbox gives you access to building native Xbox games. If you’re an indie developer today and you want to build Flame in the Flood, say, go ID. Apply to the ID program. We’ll let you in. Go get the ability to build native Xbox applications. But if we look forward, I want to enable those UWA games to run as well as Flame in the Flood does as a native Xbox game in the future.
Today, the application space that a game runs in on an Xbox One is different than the full games. If you’re going to build a Unity or Unreal or some other big game, do it that way. But you’ll see UWA games coming to Xbox sooner rather than later. Using the ability to take their code base, as Kevin showed in his dialogue, and build UI layers for different platforms — what’s a lighter-weight game? One of our biggest games on Xbox Live happens to be Microsoft Solitaire. It’s massive on Xbox Live. If I was going to move Solitaire over to Xbox, I probably wouldn’t move it over to be a native Xbox game. It’s just dragging cards around. I’d leave it as a UWA and run it on Xbox that way. But longer term, I’d like to bring those things together.
It's time for fanfiction timeline:
