Team Xbox is celebrating a massive milestone with the company having shipped more than 2000 indie titles in their ecosystem via their ID@Xbox program. Not only is this great for current Xbox gamers but with almost all of them planned to be playable on the Xbox Series X, it’s a great sign for the future of Xbox. You can watch the candid talk between Xbox’s Larry Hryb a.k.a. Major Nelson and Senior Director of the indie program Chris Charla here in its full length.
Indie games are here to stay and stronger than ever before. What started in the early days of the last decade – not the least thanks to Xbox’s excellent efforts on the Xbox 360 – has long established itself among AAA traditionally funded titles.
The indie scene has created some of the best gaming experiences ever and even crafted entirely new genres. This trend will continue going forward with the advent of next-gen consoles. The folks over at Xbox are clearly showing that they are planning to continue support indie devs and players will reap the benefits of it.
With the recent delay of Halo Infinite, the Xbox Series X has encountered quite a hurdle. Big launch titles are traditionally integral to the early success of new consoles. Halo Infinite was meant to be exactly that for the Series X but Microsoft made the difficult but commendable decision to delay the game into 2021 in favor of winning over Halo fans.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be anything to play on Microsoft’s next-gen system, however. We learn that more than 2000 titles are either being developed or optimized to work on the Series X. Microsoft has been doing a great job with backward compatibility for many years now, leaving PlayStation gamers very unsatisfied on that front.
While Sony is offering BC on the PS5, the messaging has been confusing and left Xbox as the decided victor. With Halo Infinite out of the picture, it’ll be interesting to see how far indies and BC will affect the launch of the Xbox Series X later this November.
