We sat down with the head of ID@Xbox to talk about the platform’s evolution, the success of Cuphead, local Aussie indies, and what the team is doing to make development more straightforward.

A snippet from the full interview.

The ID@Xbox program has matured over the years to the point where a lot of systems and processes and things have been fine tuned and expanded - that sort of thing. But back then, with something like Cuphead, what could you provide Studio MDHR?

---

“We gave them support, dev kits, a couple bucks here or there, but I think the visibility we gave Cuphead helped validate their own understanding of how important the game was going to be. I don't want to take any credit here, I want to be very clear in saying that it was all them. But the attention that they got after E3 2014 and then really blowing up in 2015, when people could first play the game, gave them the encouragement to keep going. Rather than trying to ship sooner and just get a game out, they decided to make the game they always wanted to make. They added a lot of new sections after E3 that maybe had been in the ‘want to have but no plan to have’ category.”

Visibility is worth so much. And it's great that you can take this thing that impresses you and the team, show it to the world, and the world reacts in the same way. A great example of what the ID@Xbox program can do for awareness. Is that still a cornerstone of what drives the team, to help create visibility for indie games? Has the process changed at all?

---

“We have more formal meetings now rather than people yelling out the door saying, ‘Hey!’. But we still meet every week to look at games with a big crew. And it's not just the ID@Xbox team, but a selection of people from throughout Microsoft. Even people who don't work in games but are passionate about games so that we're getting a broad and diverse perspective on the games we're looking at. What hasn't changed is the same goal that we had with Cuphead, which is, the world needs to see this game. And that’s something we still look for in games all the time."

Our Full ID@Xbox Interview