Microsoft Executive On No Man’s Sky, Games At E3 And The Controversial Xbox One Parity Clause

ID@Xbox Director Chris Charla on how relaxing the parity clause actually is.

No Man’s Sky is one of the most anticipated indie games of 2015. Scheduled to launch on PlayStation 4 and PC sometime this year, the game will not be coming on the Xbox One. But ID@Xbox Director Chris Charla recently stated in an interview with TiC Podcast [site URL here] that he “would love to see it on the Xbox One” but it’s something that the developer needs to decide whether they want to bring the game on the console.

He also stated that they will have games to announce at E3 but as expected he did not revealed what they are going to announce. “In terms of stuff that we want to announce at E3, I don’t want to be a jerk but you have to wait till E3. We always have some stuff to talk about at E3.”

He also explained how Microsoft have plans to bring some of the older Xbox and PC games to Windows 10 which might potentially support cross play between Xbox One and Windows 10.

“In terms of Windows 10, one of the big things we announced at GDC is ID@Xbox is going to expand and is going to cover Windows 10 as well. On Xbox we helped developers to get dev kits for free, get through the whole publishing process. On Windows 10, you obviously don’t need a dev kit since you are going to use the PC but we are going to help developers with Xbox Live, from Gamerscore and achievements and of course cross play, if they want to do it between Xbox One and Windows 10 version. I do think there will be a good number of titles, that were PC titles, will be coming to Windows 10 store which were previously standard desktop applications and hopefully we will also see games that started life on Xbox to also go to Windows 10 and potentially have cross play too.”

The Xbox One’s parity clause has been controversial till date but Charla stated that they are okay with developers launching their games on other platforms first but they would like to see some exclusive stuff when that same game launches on the Xbox One.

“We totally understand, especially for a smaller developer, one or three person shop but if someone is coming through ID@Xbox policy and they are like ‘I need to ship these games serially like I can’t ship all the console versions on the same day’, we totally understand that and we are completely happy to work with people on that kind of thing. But if somebody takes money for exclusivity for another platform or ships the game on another platform or does not ship on the Xbox, you know long time later or several months later they decide to ship on Xbox, all we ask is that they add something to the game to make it fresh for Xbox players. So Xbox players will get something fresh when they download the game. Our goal is to make sure that if the developer wants to ship the game on Xbox, they can ship the game on the Xbox One. That is the ultimate bottom line.”

What are your thoughts on Charla’s comments? Let us know in the comments section below.

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