While the concept of crowd-funding has certainly taken off over the last few years, the PC has been the only real place to you’d find this pay-as-you-go development style. However, some hope that will change in the near future.
In a recent interview, Chris Charla (who is ID@Xbox head) talked about the demand for bringing this new form of game financing to the home consoles like the Xbox One. “When we talk about Early Access, it typically means a game that you buy and it evolves over time to become 1.0, so you’re buying it before it’s 1.0. Minecraft on PC is a perfect example. It’s something developers have been asking for, and we are listening really closely to developers, but I don’t have anything to announce on that right now.” he teases.
While he may be playing coy with just how soon a crowd-funded initiative could make its way to the Xbox indie scene, what really may be holding them back is a fear for quality control. Many games developed in this manner have been, for a lack of a better term, released as an absolute jumbled mess . How will Microsoft avoid a flood of mediocre titles to its Live marketplace? Charla states, “…it’s something our store and marketplace team think about all the time. There’s a lot of heavy deep thinkers, experts, PhDs working on these problems at Xbox every day–not just for the Xbox store, but for Windows Store and Windows Phone. Our goal is to have a rational marketplace, where good games are visible and sell well,”
We’ll bring you more on Microsoft opening its console up to this new development style, if or when it happens.