Xbox Live Indie Games

» see marketplace.xbox.com/en-us/indie-games as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

xna i knew as a framework. i was in university and then early in a computer engineering career when microsoft was shipping xna game studio as the c# way to write a game that would run on windows and the xbox 360 out of the same codebase. it was the kind of thing engineers with a c# job read about even if they never wrote a game. i did not own an xbox 360 (that stack in turkey in the late 2000s was pc and playstation, mostly, with xbox as the imported minority). i never shipped anything on xna. but i read the samples.

xna game studio launched in 2004 and the indie games program grew out of it. microsoft announced xblig at gdc 2008 and the storefront opened on 19 november 2008 as part of the new xbox experience dashboard update. the pitch was that any hobbyist who wanted to write a game in c# could go through a peer review process where other registered creators played the build, checked it for crashes and content-guideline problems, and voted it into the marketplace.

the peer review model was strange for a console storefront and worked better than anyone expected. over 3,300 titles shipped during the program's life. developers got 70% of sales, microsoft kept 30%, with the option to give up an additional 10 to 20 percent for marketing consideration nobody ever seemed to receive. castleminer z was the biggest hit, the first xblig title to cross one million paid downloads, and it was more or less a minecraft mod that happened to be a standalone game with zombies.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

xblig sat in a shelf on the 360 dashboard next to the xbox live arcade proper. arcade was the curated, publisher-signed tier with things like castle crashers and braid. indie games was the peer-reviewed hobbyist tier with everything else. techno kitten adventure was there. so were cthulhu saves the world, breath of death vii, i made a game with zombies in it, and a large body of anime dress-up games that used the peer review process as a mild adult-content channel. the whole shelf had the feel of a modern itch.io running inside a locked console shell.

what made xna as a framework specifically nice was the deployment story. you wrote c# in visual studio with the xna gs assemblies, then paid $99 a year for the creators club membership and you could deploy the same build to a devkit-configured 360. the console-devkit tier at that price point had never existed before. sony and nintendo were still gating console dev behind approval and hardware kits that cost thousands. microsoft opened the gate to anyone with a credit card, and the peer review process took the place of a traditional publisher-approval workflow.

~ what really happened ~

the xna framework itself was quietly discontinued in 2013. microsoft moved its game-tech investment into direct3d and later into a set of tools that shipped as part of visual studio game development for c++. the id@xbox program launched around the same time as the successor path for indie devs on xbox one, but id@xbox required a game concept application and had a different vibe from the xblig open-door tier. for a while xblig kept running on the 360 while nothing new shipped there.

in september 2015 microsoft emailed the xblig developer list and said the storefront had two years left. the shutdown date was set at 29 september 2017. the community pushed back and got an extension to 7 october. after that date no new purchases were possible. users who had already bought a title could still redownload it. the xna creators club website went dark on 31 december 2017.

~ what got buried with it ~

the peer review model as a console distribution path did not survive. id@xbox is a signed-partner program with quality gates. nintendo's indie program is an application. sony's is an application. the itch.io equivalent inside a console shell that xblig was, briefly, has not come back. what the program actually left behind was a cohort of developers who had a first paying customer via a $99 creators club membership and used the 70% revenue share to fund whatever they built next. some of them ended up at studios that still ship on steam and switch. most of the games are gone in any legal digital sense.

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