Those of us that are hardcore gamers have probably thought at one point or another that we would love to be a game developer on our favorite game. I know I would love to be able to create a map for Gears of War, a new feature for Madden NFL, or maybe create my own game. In years’ past you would have to have some kind of development kit, but with the new XBOX One, everyone will have a development kit right in their household. According to an interview on Edge every XBOX One can be unlocked into a devkit and developers can “whitelist” certain XBOX One consoles to help with Q&A.
Here is an excerpt from the Edge Interview with Microsoft Studios’ partner creative director; Ken Lobb:
How did the plans to turn every retail Xbox into a development kit manifest?
If you peer into the past, just take everything we did right and learned from on XBLA, everything we did right and learned from on XNA, and combine them together: that’s the indie story we’ve got for Xbox One. And some of that is: how can you let everybody become a developer? At one end of the spectrum you get Project Spark, where it’s Kodu – six-year-olds can make games. It’s one of the best level editors I’ve ever played with. It’s so easy to sculpt levels in Spark. We use Kodu to basically teach you everything about how to be a developer. Then jump to Unity, make your machine a devkit, make a game and put it on our store. Bring it. Go ahead and make millions. That’s what we want.
Why the wait to turn retail boxes into development kits?
So at first we have dedicated devkits [and that’s what we’ll send to developers]. But the existing devkit is just an Xbox that’s locked into development mode. The reason [for the delay] is that there’s some work we had to finish on the back end before we could enable it. But the boxes we ship on day one are all ready to be turned into development kits right away.
I have worked with EA SPORTS on providing feedback on many their games before release including NCAA Football, Madden NFL, Tiger Woods, and NBA Live. I think this is awesome and should allow developers to tap into their community and the hardcore gamers that play their game and use this “whitelist” feature to push builds to their console. I can see more BETAs for games being available to playeres.
What do you think about every XBOX One being a devkit and the ability for Game Developers to “whitelist” your XBOX One to help with feedback for your favorite game.
