Every Xbox One a Development Kit - What's that mean for us indies and Unity?

Just saw this on Engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/24/xbox-one-indie-self-publishing/

Any info or ideas?


TheLorax

 

Makes it ever so slightly more appealing.

Its still an xbox though...

 

+1

If all the other consoles were to be destroyed, including old ones and Xbox One was the only system to buy, I'd rather go outside and play!!!

 

What are gaming fanboys doing at a game developer's site? Serious question.

I would think game developers would be glad more options are opening up to the indie community.

 

this is a good move on their part. im wondering what kind of exploits this is going to open up, if anyone can run any code they want on their own xbox.

 

In my opinion this is truly great news. With XNA no longer being pushed by Microsoft, surely this is a massive opportunity for Unity, and we all need Unity to do well. Looking forwards to seeing how this develops.

 

Well if every XOne can be a Debug-Console for Indies...well, damn. Now I have to buy one right away
And as far as I know MS partnered up with Unity for the XOne.

 

I just did a goddamn backflip when I heard the news...and I will be updating to Unity 4 soon I could not be any happier than I am now. I am VERY proud to be a Unity user...

 

I was just about to post about this if it wasn't here. This is an exciting time to be a game developer, I can't wait to see what Sony has in store for the PS4, too!

 

+1

 

Unity had announced that games published by Microsoft Game Studios would get access to Xbox One as a target platform free of charge. It would be nice if they would extend the same to self-published games.

I'm hoping, given the release of Unity 4.2 and how it opened up the Windows 8 Store and Windows Phone 8 Store at no additional charge (including Pro features for Pro licensees), that they will follow suit and make Xbox One a target platform for no additional cost. Pro licensees could get Pro features and the Standard licensees could get Standard features.

I think that would be ideal.

One major reason the quality of the Xbox 360's indie program was so low is because there were very few (if any?) viable game authoring tools/engines to support the developers. Everything had to be written from the ground up. With access to tools like Unity 3D...I suspect Xbox LIVE Indie Games would have seen significantly higher quality products.

All in all, I think this is good news...and if Unity 3D gets us to the platform (without an additional $1,500 spend) then the news just gets better.

 

I almost got really excited then I remembered that xbox doesnt allow you to self publish.

 

I wouldn't get too excited about this folks. Revenue split is probably 50-50.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...elf-publishing-new-certification-process.aspx

 

Its ok! 50/50 of $0 is still $0!

 

How comes that you can change your signatures font color and size and we can't?

I think you should play fair here and don't get a extrawurst

 

They do now.

 

Same thing Apple fanboys are doing when someone asks for a good bang for the buck development rig setup. I have no idea.

 

This earns from me one gloried "meh". Though I suppose this might be useful to people interested in working with Microsoft for Xbox One publishing.

 

The current XBox supports the same thing (as someone else pointed out), although XNA is the only framework allowed in the Indie store. If they bump it up to a 50/50 split, that's quite a bit worse than the 30/70 split it is now.

Honestly, XNA wasn't that bad, combine it with the Sunburn engine, and you had a pretty good setup. The only issue was the fact that MS decided to stop developing it and cut all support for it.

 

The MS hate bandwagon is a fun thing to ride, and gives you a +5 cool factor.

But...honestly...Microsoft has really, really disappointed me for a while now as far as gaming goes. They just don't seem to take it serious at all, even when the PC is THE most successful gaming platform ever.
And they just let XNA die, like slugs. Their development tools are so awesome...I thought, hey maybe they will release Visual Game Development Studio, full debugging support, whatever I can dream up.
Nada. Zip. Nothing. Sad. I guess that would be a focus on something other than enterprise development.

 

Everyone's a critic when it's not their dayjob and they're living in hobbyistville.

 

What are you talking about? People critisizing the XBOne?

I like this, for me as a hobbiest it is still good to get a game onto the XB even if it is a 50/50 cut. If I made a game that could buy an Xb one then I would. I hope this will encorage similar things for Ps4 and Wii-U.

 

Ill happily put my game on xbox.



if i ever finish the bloody thing


[unrelated]dafaq is this must wait 60 seconds bs[/unrelated]

 

Awesome news indeed.

 

If each one is a dev kit, then that can only be a good thing for us indies.
It seems MS is taking a page out of OUYA's book. Dev kit screams of openness, which is great to hear.

Also bear in mind MS and Unity recently announced a partnership deal for Windows Store licenses to come free with Pro, this is a big step forward for MS in the indie/game dev space. Co-inciding with the fact they are no longer supporting XNA (Which I think Unity is the main reason behind).

So don't be surprised if Unity and MS sign some sort of Xbox deal, I'm not sure if it will be free like the Windows Store licenses, but if MS and Unity are in bed for one platform, no reason they won't be looking at adding another.

 

I wouldn't say they're following Ouya's lead, since you've been able to use a regular Xbox 360 for XBLIG development for years now. Say what you want about Microsoft, but they were the first to allow anyone with $99 a year and the ability to pass a simple peer review to deploy games to a console. In any case, as someone who really enjoyed developing on a fixed platform with real button inputs, this sounds like fantastic news (at least potentially).

 

Like every other announcement of the XB1 this is muddled and last minute. Microsoft have a way to go to convince the indie devs, the XB1 has become a ticking time bomb, a console announced with so many heinous and stifling features that they've almost all been reversed, and a patched up last minute self publishing proposal sounds a nightmare.
After the recent antics of MS I'm avoiding XB1 unless it proves itself as trustworthy (and they get rid of that bloody camera)

 

The big problem isn't it being a "muddled and last minute" announcement, but the fact that every journalist thinks themselves an expert after hearing 8th-hand rumors. MS's stance on indies when the console was announced was "indies are important to us but we aren't announcing anything yet, more to come soon." The whole "XB1 does not allow self-publishing or indies at all" thing came from journalists posting rumors and having devs who were already angry at MS for other reasons comment on it, which made it snowball into a hate-train on the subject.

This news sounds like it has been in the works for a long time and they were waiting on various bits to be worked out before announcing it (e.g. licensing matters, the Unity partnership, etc.), especially given the hints dropped by MS personnel and associated developers over the last couple of months. However, the narrative in the news is "Sony allowed self-publishing so MS has done a sudden back track to copy them! Again! Here's a developer who burnt his bridges with MS months ago to moan about it actually being a bad idea so we can present his unfounded opinions as facts!" which is rather deliberately presenting the news in a bad light instead of presenting it in the unbiased way it should be reported in.

Over all this is good news for everyone, whether they're fans of Xbox and MS or not as it allows yet another major platform for developers to get their games out on. How can that be a bad thing? I mean, if not allowing indies to self-publish in an App Store style process is a bad thing, this has to be a good thing. It seems impossible for them to do anything right with the XB1 given how when the media reports them doing it one way, everyone complains, but when they announce they're actually doing something completely opposite, the same people still complain. I can't wrap my head around it.

EDIT: Here's an interview with MS's Marc Whitten which goes into a bit more detail about it: http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/microsoft-confirms-self-publishing-on-xbox-one/1100-4696/
Basically, it will allow full feature access to the hardware and OS (achievements and all) and have every game in the same marketplace, not segregated like XBLIG on the 360, with much more control over pricing and much quicker turn around for certification.

 

hmm the last console I bought was the XBox. The current console generation didn't seem very interesting to me in comparison to PC&iOS.
However I must admit if every XBox One doubles as a dev kit and I can play my (Unity?) games/demos on the console then that would be a pretty huge incentive to buy One. What quite confuses me is that everyone keeps praising Sony&Nintendo in the comments to this news for their opennes towards Indies. You can't do this on a Wii U or PS4 right? While I've never considered a Wii U with its awkward controllers anyway this could make me switch from my plans for PS4 to XBox One.

 

Shake it, shake, shake, shake, shake it like a polaroid picture!
Gigi

 

Competition is good, even if I only own 1 console at a time. First, the original XBox, then a Wii, and now the PS3. Since PS3 titles don't work on PS4, I'm inclined to try the XBox One - shake things up a bit.

Gigi

 

@Devilbox...thanks for the interview link.

After reading that, I think it's really unfair how many people are saying that this is like XBLIG 2.0.

Unless Whitten was just telling bald faced lies, this is very much giving developers first-class access to all the gear. When I stopped working in XNA (right around the release of 4.0), there was no Kinect access and certainly no achievements access. Microsoft's new cloud server augmentation wasn't even on the slate, and discovery was a joke.

This really does sound world's apart from the first go-round of XBLIG.

It will be great to hear more come Gamescom.

I think the lack of game authoring tools for XNA really led to sub par product on XBLIG. I am very hopeful that Unity and MS will come to terms and give us the Xbox One as a target. I love Unity...and I hold 3 Pro platform licenses...but man it's like a kick to the groin every time I pay that license fee. :-/

 

I could care less, Micro$oft has still screwed themselves over with the Xbox One by having it region locked. I'm sure that Micro$oft has some sort of rigged scheme to screw indies over too.

 

Access to Kinect and achievements will be cool. But one fear is that they'll require your games work across Windows 8, Windows RT, Windows Phone, *and* Xbox One or something. If that ends up being the case, in some ways that could be even worse than the XNA limitations. The best case for me would be if they'll allow games specifically optimized for Xbox One (and of course if they let you develop in Unity!).

That's a bit premature, but it's certainly possible.

Definitely. I did my first 3D game in XNA and it took forever without proper tools. It was a great learning experience (learning about shader programming and such), but I ended up essentially having to write my own mini engine. It would have taken a tiny fraction of the time with Unity.

 

It isn't a bad thing. This is a positive development, certainly.

At the same time, I will temper my enthusiasm. I think most developers are going to approach this announcement with cautious optimism. While it is true that some developers have been unusually critical of XBLA as of late, they have had plenty of good reasons. And it is true that throughout the life of the 360, the only self-publishing that Microsoft allowed on the 360 was in the Indies section. (which ended up being a hot mess as far as pricing, promotion, and approval were concerned)

Hearing that they will finally begin exploring self-publishing is good news. It is an option that needs to be explored for the XBox brand to be more viable for indie development. And hearing that they will be taking the same hardware approach as the 360, allowing the retail hardware to serve as a dev box is also very positive. That's something that any developer would want.

The problem is that we haven't gotten any real details. We have no idea about the specific restrictions that will be in place. We don't know what kind of fee structures or licensing are going to go into this new initiative. And we don't know if there are going to be any standardized libraries or APIs that will be made available. XNA is dead and gone now, will there be some manner of replacement for it? On top of all of this, Microsoft didn't make any of these factors a priority in its marketing and messaging for its new console. That not only speaks to how much of a priority they consider indie development, it also indicates how far along in development the XBox One was when it was announced.

This is positive news, but I'm not jumping for joy. Microsoft still has a lot to prove. I do look forward to hearing more.

 

1) It's no longer region locked.

2) This is a game development site. Please take the fanboyism elsewhere.

Thank you.

 

I wasn't even considering a console before but if I have $500 to blow I'll buy an xBox One. There are nice things you can do with that kind of access to a HDTV and nice speakers beyond your typical game.

 

It's not fanboyism, I just dislike Micro$oft. I didn't say I support ps4 and I assume Sony's just as bad.

 

It's good news. They definitely have to compete with Sony when it comes to being friendly to the smaller developers. Shoot Sony has been handing out their PS4 dev kits to indies like candy lately. You get the thing for an entire year.

Link to news: http://www.latinospost.com/articles...y-offers-developers-dev-kit-free-one-year.htm

Seems like all the major console makers are in a gold rush to snag indie developers for their systems. It's really blowing up in a good way for everyone.

 

Yeah, great, the Xbone is a dev kit. I love having to optimise my code and assets early on because I'm locked into 5 gigs of shared system memory. That's a productive use of my time. Totally. This is pretty much junk if you're working on any larger sized project and there's still no real information on just how this is going to work in the first place.

The PS4 setup is far, FAR nicer.

 

Any news on a Unity/PS4 dev kit?

 

The only news I've seen is something that says "this fall" in a poorly translated Japanese article. Considering how the last update we got on the GUI was June of last year I wouldn't really expect any news until it's actually been out for a week and a half.

 

...really?

 

That was sarcasm. The Xbone has 3 gigs of RAM dedicated to the OS. The remaining 5 gigs are allocated for the rest of your game, including sound and graphics. If you're working on a game designed to target 1080p that's in 3D, you'll have to account for this early on in development instead of optimising everything later. This is one of the HUGE benefits of an actual devkit, along with proper debug tools, profilers and everything. There's still no information on how to get an actual devkit into the hands of an indie developer, which is a problem.

 

I'm still not understanding where the sarcasm comes in. 5 gigs is bucketloads, and if you're not setting and working to platform-specific performance and resource budgets early on in the process you're asking for trouble any which way you look at it.

Yes, a purpose built dev kit would be superior, but if you can't make awesome stuff with what's on offer I highly doubt the problem is with the tools at your disposal.

 

5 gigs is bucketloads when your project is done. When you're developing, it causes a poor allocation of time relative to the alternative.

 

I strongly disagree on both points, for reasons stated in my previous post. I've tried both ways and my preference is resoundingly clear.

I'm really curious, what do you do that requires so much RAM?

 

Heaps of dev machines don't even have 5 gigs of ram. I doubt you need that ram and it is rather clear that you are trolling just to hate on the xb1. Most here will be porting games made for mobile or will be making simple games(I could not think of one game I've seen on these forums that should need 5 gigs of ram)

 

You realize the PS4 is in the same situation? The PS4 only has 4.5gb dedicated to the game, with another 512mb of "flexible" ram which may or may not be available depending on what the OS is doing and 512mb of virtual memory according to recent reports. As far as I'm aware the actual devkits Sony has been handing out so far only have 8gb of ram in too.