There isn’t much love in the developer world for the ID@Xbox parity clause, which requires independent game developers to release their games on Xbox One at the same time as on other platforms. Some developers have lodged public complaints about it, and rival Sony has lambasted it.
It’s not that Xbox head Phil Spencer hasn’t heard these complaints, it’s that he believes that despite these objections and ridicule, the parity clause takes care of his most important audience: Xbox One owners.
“The thing I worry about is — because I look at all the people who buy an Xbox, and they invest their time and their money in Xbox One, and, as millions of people obviously own Xbox Ones, I want them to feel like they’re first-class, because they are,” Spencer said on The Inner Circle podcast. “When a third-party game comes out, it comes out on all platforms at the same time, and when indie games come out, I want them to come out and I want Xbox to feel like it’s a first-class citizen when an indie game launches.
“So, for me, the parity thing is, if you own an Xbox One, I want to work for you to make sure that when great content launches, if it’s coming to Xbox and another platform, that you kind of get it at the same time everybody else does.”
Despite wanting to do what he thinks is best for owners of his product, Spencer added that he understands some indie developers are too small to complete versions of a game for multiple platforms all at once. In those cases, he said that he asks the studio in question to “have a conversation” with him, and that that approach has worked well.
The parity clause, then, is not written in stone. Exceptions are made — just not for games studios asking for them because they’re favoring a competing platform.
Spencer doesn’t “want somebody to come in and just think ‘I’m going to go do a special game on one platform and then I’ll get to Xbox whenever I get to it.'”
Although he said he currently feels “pretty good about the plan,” it seems he’s not totally against changing it. Spencer confirmed as much in a tweet responding to a question asking if he’d seen the reactions to his statements on NeoGAF. “I see the feedback on my stance on the clause, I want to rethink how we approach this, responses are heard.”
Source: GameSpot
The Author
You Might Also Like
