In a recent interview with OXM, Xbox’s Director of Development, Boyd Multerer, had the opportunity to speak on a number of different topics – with one of the more exciting details of the interview being that games written for Windows 8 using DirectX can be ported over to Xbox One in just a day or two.
The basic box is definitely easier to develop for, and that goes a long way. We spent a lot of time making sure that if you know how to write a game in DirectX in Windows, you already know how to write a game in Xbox One, and the games that are being written for Windows 8 that are using DX are porting really quickly to Xbox One. Like often in a day, maybe two. Yes, you have to tweak for the specific performance characteristics of this box but you basically already know how to do it, if you’ve developed for Windows. It’s more complicated than that, but yeah.
Looking forward, this is most certainly going to prove to be a significant advantage for both the Xbox platform and developers looking to easily expand their PC projects to the console space. Currently not many games have been specifically written for Windows 8 yet, but with both the evolution of hardware standards and the software advancements that Windows 8 brings to the market, Multerer thinks that both indie and less-than-indie PC developers will likely find Xbox One to be a fantastic platform to develop for.
I think that the Indies are going to find the Xbox One to be a fantastic platform. I ran XNA, and I care tremendously about the indies and as we were designing the Xbox One, one of my goals was to bake in support for independent developers really deeply into the operating system.
Clearly the director of development is going to have good things to say about the console he is largely responsible for creating, but considering how Microsoft has been aiming the ease console-to-PC conversation since the early days of the Xbox 360 via XNA, it only makes sense that the parity between development strategies for Windows 8 and Xbox One would be a focal-point of Microsoft’s console design.
