Microsoft does another 180, this time on Xbox One for indie games

There have been rumors for a few days now that Microsoft was going to announce a change to their indie game strategy for the Xbox One. The lack of a pathway to self-publishing had been a point of criticism with both gamers and developers because Sony made it a point to embrace indies on the PS4 during and after E3. GameInformer posted a report based on anonymous sources earlier, but Polygon got the official confirmation that Microsoft is going to offer a way for developers without publisher sponsorship to get their games on the Xbox One.

“Our vision is that every person can be a creator,” Marc Whitten, corporate vice president at Xbox said in a statement. “That every Xbox One can be used for development. That every game and experience can take advantage of all of the features of Xbox One and Xbox LIVE. This means self-publishing. This means Kinect, the cloud, achievements. This means great discoverability on Xbox LIVE. We’ll have more details on the program and the timeline at Gamescom in August.”

One of the points in the GameInformer article was that any Xbox One could be turned into a debug console via an online code update. The statement from Whitten would seem to support that rumor.