From what we have been able to cobble together, the new Microsoft policy would separate indie developers into two groups, the first of which would be those indie developers that are very small indie developers, normally consisting of a team of two or three that are truly what are considered the independent studios. The second group would be those that are larger and more established studios, with often larger and established development teams.
The differences between the two would be that those larger and more established indie developers would not simply publish anything that they produce, which would prevent these teams from flooding the market with releases. In addition, there would be some sort of a selection process that would be involved, but it isn’t clear how that would work.
It is also rumored that there is talk of cutting the price of or providing some sort of a lower-cost Xbox One SDK (Development Kit), which is important because the cost of $10,000 is a big issue for indie developers who are trying to develop software on a shoe string budget, or no budget at all. It is not clear if this is going to happen or how it might happen, but it is a problem that would need to be addressed in order to really get indie publishing off the ground for Xbox One.
We never really thought that Microsoft would abandon indie-developed software, as it has yielding some very good and interesting things with its run on the Xbox 360. The fact that Sony is also embracing it makes it more difficult for Microsoft to just ignore it.
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