ID@Xbox's Chris Charla: "There's less need to separate indie from AAA"
Chris Charla, strategic director of Microsoft's indie programme ID@Xbox, says the need to separate indie titles from AAA is diminishing in many regards.
During a fireside chat-style opening keynote at Develop:Brighton today, Charla was asked about the blurring lines between the two ends of the spectrum when it comes to games publishing, and he observed that players don't place as much emphasis on the distinction. He added that few people who play indie games would define themselves as indie gamers.
"For consumers, we actually need to separate it less and less. Consumers just think about games, 'this game is cool, that game is cool, I want this one and that one.' For them, Call of Duty and Castle Crashers are both things they may have and play.
"So on a creative side, I don't think we have to separate them, but there is still value in separating them on the business side. Typically, indie developers are much smaller, they have a totally different relationship in terms of capitalisation and how often games come out and things like that. On the business side, there's still a huge difference between AAA and indie, although on the creative side, the output might be different but from a consumer perspective, they're all just video games."
He later revisited this idea when talking about how he gauges how important indies are to Xbox and Microsoft, or at least how that importance is presented to the public, and said he bases it partially on how many ID@Xbox titles are in the platform holder's big summer showcase.
"We used to group all of the indie games together at E3 showcases, because that was important at the time I think, and then at a certain point we decided we didn't need to do that anymore," he said. "We don't need
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