Microsoft Closing its Indie Games Program
Microsoft has announced that Xbox Live Indie Games is coming to an end. The idea behind Xbox Live Indie Games was to allow creators to make and upload games to Xbox Live for a fee. While anyone could play the games you had to be a member of the XNA Creators Club to make them. Creators will still be allowed to continue uploading games until September 9th 2016, but the program won’t fully shut down until September 2017 leaving the final games to be published a year to be played. While no new members will be accepted to the XNA Creators Club existing members will get a permanent Windows Developers account. The program, which was first launched in 2006, has been ignored more and more since the arrival of the Xbox One so Microsoft obviously don’t see a profit in continuing it. Microsoft still has plans to allow any retail Xbox One to be used for development via ID@Xbox making Xbox Live Indie Games less relevant anyway.
