Sony and Nintendo are also competing for attention

Aug 14, 2013 09:32 GMT  ·  By

Brian Fargo, the leader of the development team working on Wasteland 2, says that Microsoft is actually interested in bringing as many indie titles as possible to its Xbox One home console when it launches and the changes at the company are more than cosmetic.

The chief executive officer of InXile tells A List Daily that, “They’ve come full circle in a matter of ninety days, on every part of it, including the ability to be on the platform at all. Sony was already there; they go one step further with their Dev Pub fund, where they actually give developers money upon delivery of a game.”

Fargo says that even Nintendo is showing more interest because it does not want quality gaming experiences to be launched on an array of devices that does not include the Wii U.

Initially, Microsoft signaled that indie developers would need to partner with a publisher in order to launch a title on the Xbox One, but then the company performed a U-turn and announced that the console itself could be used as a development platform.

The CEO of InXile adds, “You can use the hardware as a development kit, making it more accessible, because indies can’t afford to buy. It used to be that if you shipped on Sony first you could never be on the Xbox. Now they’re like ‘Well, we’re flexible, maybe there are features…’ There’s a different dialog there.”

The popularity of indie games can be summed up by the fact that the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft has been leading the United Kingdom video game chart for the last few weeks.

Both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 are set to launch in November of this year.

Indies will probably start to launch on the two platforms soon after that, with The Witness already confirmed for the Sony platform.