During the past year, Microsoft has shown a strong effort to reel indie developers into the Xbox family. It’s a big change coming from a company that was previously lashed by developers for being difficult to deal with. Now, tons of indie developers are being won over, and so are Xbox gamers.
A total of 65 indie development studios have recently signed up with the ID@Xbox program bringing the total up to above 200 studios. These studios include the following:
- 4gency
- A Crowd of Monster
- Alientrap Games
- The Behemoth
- BetaDwarf
- Big Ant Studios
- Bloober Team
- Blowfish Studios
- Brain in a Jar
- Brushfire Games
- Cherry Pop Games Ltd
- Codeglue
- Code-Monkeys
- Compulsion Games
- Crunching Koalas
- Deco Digital
- Empty Clip Studios
- Escalation Studios
- EXOR Studios
- FarSight Studios
- Fatshark
- Flix Interactive
- Four Door Lemon Ltd
- Frambosa
- Frima
- Glass Bottom Games
- HB Studios
- Headup Games
- Heart Machine
- Holmade Games
- Humble Hearts LLC
- I Fight Bears
- Implausible Industries
- Iridium Studios
- iSquared Games Ltd
- Larian Studios
- Mediatonic
- MeinMein
- Mighty Rabbit Studios
- Mimimi Productions
- nDreams Ltd
- NeocoreGames
- No Goblin
- n-Space
- Piwot
- Pixel Balloon
- Playdead
- Rebellion
- Relentless Software
- RetroCoders
- Ripstone
- Robomodo
- Ska Studios
- Smudged Cat Games Ltd
- Snowrunner
- Spry Fox
- Tiny Castle Studios
- Toxic Games
- Vector Unit
- Vertigo Games BV
- VooFoo Studios
- Warhorse Studios
- WaterMelon
- Xona Games
- Zoë Mode
Many of these are freshly constructed studios, but a few of them have years of experience. Zoë Mode made Zumba Fitness, and even the recently released Powerstar Golf. Meanwhile Robomodo made Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD (uh oh).
ID@Xbox allows studios to receive free dev kits and eventually self-publish their title provided they release the game on Xbox One.
We’ll be seeing more about what these studios are up to at GDC next month when Microsoft plans to make several announcements.
