The showcase will include new announcements and updates on the following upcoming titles. DON’T NOD is confirmed, which means we’ll likely see more of Lost Records: Bloom and Rage. Similarly, 11 bit studios will appear so its sci-fi social survival title The Alters is likely to show up. Other confirmed studios include Raw Fury, Team17, and Curve Games. You can find a full list below.

Meanwhile, IGN’s post also confirms that the showcase will reveal Balatro’s next big collaboration DLC.

As per leaks, a State of Play presentation and a Nintendo Direct focused on upcoming Switch 1 games are also allegedly coming this month. The next few weeks are thus likely to be packed with new announcements. Stay tuned for more updates.

List of studios confirmed for ID@Xbox Showcase:

• 11 bit studios
• BigFan
• Critical Reflex
• Daedalic Entertainment
• Game Source Entertainment
• No More Robots
• Panic
• Playstack
• Raw Fury
• Cult Games
• Team17
• Curve Games
• Akapura
• DON’T NOD
  

The company says the showcase will feature “epic trailers, fresh gameplay, and new reveals”, in addition to updates on a number of previously announced upcoming indie titles. That will include Microbird Games’ social sim action RPG Dungeons of Hinterberg and Don’t Nod’s narrative adventure game Lost Records: Bloom and Rage, among “many others.”

At this point, it’s obligatory bring up Hollow Knight: Silksong and wonder whether Team Cherry’s long-awaited Metroidvania sequel will finally resurface with a release date announcement. Recently, the game got its official Xbox Store page, while it has also received age ratings in South Korea, Australia, and by the ESRB, suggesting an announcement could be imminent. Then again, many events have come and gone, with Silksong remaining as elusive as ever, so perhaps it’s best to temper expectations.

Microsoft has announced that the first ID@Xbox Showcase of the year will be happening later today, at 10 AM PT. What games we can expect to see remains a mystery for now, but we do know the showcase will be about an hour long and will pack in new trailers, interview with game developers, and more, with the focus, of course, being entirely on upcoming indie games.

Past ID@Xbox Showcases have shown some pretty great stuff, so this will probably be worth tuning into. It’s also likely that we’ll be seeing new day and date announcements for Game Pass as well, if past showcases and indie announcements are anything to go by. Stay tuned for more details.

https://twitter.com/ID_Xbox/status/1643327593326706693

Microsoft’s indie games program ID@Xbox has been a huge success thus far, with over $1.4 billion spent on games till date. This was revealed by European lead Agostino Simonetta at the recent GamesIndustry.biz  Investment Summit Online. Thus far, the program covered 3,400 studios across 64 countries.

Simonettta said that, “Obviously, we are not a publisher — we are the platform. We don’t know how many are coming, or when they will come, but there’s a lot of activity.” Right now, ID@Xbox is aware of around 1,800 games that are in the works under its program. Considering that it was first announced back in August 2013, it’s certainly come a long way.

After the Xbox One was initially revealed back in 2013, it generated significant criticism for its indie game policy especially since it required titles to be published through Microsoft or a third-party publisher. ID@Xbox did away with that requirement, making it much easier for even single-person studios to bring their games to the console. However, there was the parity clause, which stated that any game under ID@Xbox had to release for all other platforms at the same time. We haven’t heard too much about that over the years, for better or worse.

Time will tell how much further ID@Xbox can go so stay tuned for more details.

Microsoft’s Inside Xbox returns today at 2 PM PT/5 PM PT on YouTube, Twitch and Mixer. The 40 minute long episode will feature the likes of Obsidian Entertainment’s Grounded, The Coalition’s Gears Tactics, Rare’s Sea of Thieves and “surprises” from ID@Xbox. Check out the promo video below.

Xbox Game Pass will also be featured so expect some new game announcements there. Interestingly, while the Xbox Series X won’t have any new details, the console’s director of program management Jason Ronald will talk about its specifications. You can read up on the specifications here and see how they compare to the PS5 here.

Obsidian Entertainment’s Grounded should be interesting since we’ll get our first look at its single-player campaign. Perhaps Microsoft will also confirm its early access/Xbox Game Preview release date (which is still listed as Spring 2020). We may also learn about the Steam release date for Sea of Thieves. Stay tuned for more details later today when Inside Xbox goes live.

Following the recent Inside Xbox stream, Microsoft revealed its ID@Xbox Game Pass showcase for Fall 2019. These represent indie efforts that will be added to the subscription service on PC and Xbox One overtime. We know about titles like Cities: Skylines, Lonely Mountains: Downhill and Genesis Noir but there are a few surprises there.

For instance, Playtonic’s Yooka-Laylee will be joining the roster, bringing its retro-style 3D platforming to the masses. The Escapists 2 is also set to release along with Devolver Digital titles like Minit, The Red Strings Club and The Talos Principle. Dead by Daylight, the popular asymmetrical horror multiplayer title, is also coming.

A number of these titles are coming in 2019. The good news is that there are several titles available today to play. This includes Bad North, GoNNER, Slay the Spire and Enter the Gungeon (along with the previously released SteamWorld Dig 2). Stay tuned for more details on indie releases for the console in the meantime,

The last decade has seen an explosion in the success and popularity of indie games, which has led to several major publishers opening up dedicated avenues to supporting individual creators. One of the most prominent among those is Microsoft’s ID@Xbox programme, which has won plaudits over the years for how it has enabled a number of successful indie titles, and how it’s fostered the indie scene on Xbox in particular.

With Xbox Scarlett, Microsoft is putting a greater focus on first party and on Game Pass, of course, while with the advent of xCloud, their priorities in how they view success in the market in general are also shifting. But is the onset of a new console going to bring about a change in their partnerships and relationships with indie developers as well? Not according to ID@Xbox senior director Chris Charla.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Charla gave assurances that Microsoft’s strategy with the ID@Xbox programme won’t be changing with Xbox Scarlett. “Yeah, absolutely,” said Charla when asked if ID@Xbox will continue to function the same way with Xbox Scarlett as it has been doing so far. “There’s no plans to change it. Our main goal at the start of the program is our main goal now, just to make life easy for indie developers – if we can make life easy for them and make getting onto the platform as easy as possible, then we’re gonna have lots of great content, we’re gonna have lots of diverse content, and players are gonna be happy. And that won’t change at all.”

Considering how successful ID@Xbox has been and how important indie games have become to console libraries in general, it makes sense that Microsoft will want to keep on doing what they have been doing. Here’s hoping we see further growth in its future with the coming generation.

Taking a page out of Nintendo’s playbook with the Nindies Showcase, Microsoft has announced ID@Xbox Game Pass. Premiering on March 26th, the stream will shine a spotlight on all the indie titles that are coming to Xbox Game Pass in the future. It will start at 9 AM PDT.

The recent announcement promises new reveals, developer discussions, and gameplay. In the debut episode, players can expect to see more of titles like Afterparty, Void Bastards, and Supermarket Shriek. The team will also visit Afterparty developer Night School Studio to go behind the scenes with the game’s development.

Microsoft has been doing a fairly good job of including indie titles in the Game Pass catalogue. Recent months have seen titles like Below, Ashen, Vampyr, and so on being available on the service, increasing its value even further. When you also consider that Microsoft has a consolidated subscription service for all these releases, it could have somewhat of an advantage over Nintendo’s Nindies. Time will tell though, so stay tuned.

Game Pass is one of the best ideas to have come out of Microsoft in years. For a very reasonable subscription price, players get access to a vast and ever-growing library of games– and though that’s something that obviously is very valuable for consumers, according to Microsoft’s Chris Charla, the director of the ID@Xbox program, that is something that has greatly benefited indie developers as well.

Speaking with Stevivor, Charla talked about how being on Game Pass automatically gets more people to try out games made by indie devs, and that the exposure those games receive as such is something that makes for greater success in all other areas for the game and the developer as well.

“We’ve paid more than a billion dollars in royalties to independent developers in the past 4-5 years,” Charla said. “We have this great marketplace but there’s still a lot of people that don’t know about all these games. By putting these games in Game Pass, developers get this opportunity. People are getting to download these games at no additional cost, they check out a lot of games, they’re playing these games. They’re popping achievements which are showing up on the community hub. They’re streaming the games on Mixer.”

“We knew that Game Pass was going to be a really great value proposition for players and we of course worked to make sure that it’s a great value proposition for developers on the business side,” he continued. “We maybe didn’t understand what a great discovery tool it was going to be. It’s actually turning out to be a really interesting discovery tool for a lot of developers to have their game in Game Pass. People are playing it, their friends see it, they start buying.”

Charla also went on to discuss the possibility of whether there will be any Game Pass exclusive releases in the future, which is something that he says is unlikely to happen.

“I don’t see [exclusive distribution through Xbox Game Pass] happening any time soon,” he said. “I think [Game Pass] will remain like a tightly curated selection of games for the foreseeable future. I do think it’s going to be a great way to discover new games and it’s been really popular with fans and the value proposition is huge.

“We’re always looking at what the future could bring and as we look at Game Pass and how games perform at Game Pass, how players interact with the games that are in Game Pass, we’re constantly making suggestions to developers, thinking about how we run the program and everything like that and always trying to make sure it’s the biggest win for the players and our developers.”

Xbox Game Pass subscriptions cost $10 per month, though first-time subscribers can get in for just $1. The excellent indie-developed Ashen recently launched, and is also on Game Pass- give it a whirl if you have a subscription.

The Xbox One will be playing host to a variety of indie games via its ID@Xbox program; today at Gamescom, Microsoft showed off a whole lot of them in a new ID@Xbox sizzle reel trailer, which you can see for yourself below.

Among the games that are showcased and highlighted in this trailer are Unruly Heroes, Hello Neighbor, Path of Exile, Raiders of the Broken Planet, Fable Fortune, Tacoma, Cuphead, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Battlerite, Strange Brigade, Black Desert Online, Train Sim World: CSX Heavy Haul, Robocraft Infinity, and Conan Exiles. It’s a very good mix of games- and where Xbox is dropping the ball on exclusives game support, at least it seems to be getting some pretty cool and varied looking indie games.

You will be able to play some of these games, like Path of Exile, Battlegrounds, and Cuphead, later this year (some like Tacoma are already out). Others should be launching on the system in the months to follow.