It’s been a few weeks since the Xbox E3 briefing, which has just about given us enough time to calm down from the excitement of Keanu Reeves appearing onstage. The other big news from that conference, of course, surrounded Project Scarlett – Xbox’s mysterious next-generation console, which we now know is arriving in Holiday 2020 with Halo Infinite. And we finally got to hear some official specs – although many of the details remain hazy.
Well, we heard a bit about that triple-A title during the briefing, but what about the indies? What does Project Scarlett mean for them?
Inside the bustling Microsoft Theatre during E3 week, I sat down with ID@Xbox senior director Chris Charla to discuss Project Scarlett (as much as we could), along with more general topics such as the impact of subscription services and consolidation on independent developers, and Charla’s thoughts on the wider game curation debate.
I thought I’d start off with the exciting news about Project Scarlett – is ID@Xbox going to work the same way next-gen?
Chris Charla: Yeah, absolutely. 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.
Do indie devs have dev kits yet for Project Scarlett? Or is it too early for that?
Chris Charla: I don’t think we’re talking about dev kit availability right now. I apologise, I can’t really amplify anything that was said about Scarlett more than what Phil talked about onstage.
Do current indies need to do anything to get their games ready for back compat for Scarlett?
Chris Charla: No – one of the things about back compat is it just works. Phil said onstage that every game that plays on Xbox One is going to play on Scarlett, and so we’re super excited for that.
What are you looking forward to, in terms of the opportunities offered by Project Scarlett?
Chris Charla: When we’re looking at the hardware capabilities, it’s really exciting, and I’m really excited about ray tracing – not just for graphics, but for the other things you can do with ray tracing like using ray tracing for collision, and even audio.