Xbox: "We want to build on the potential we’re seeing in India"

gamesindustry.biz:

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While consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S haven't flown off store shelves in India, mobile gaming continues to scale one peak after another in the country.

Microsoft now has a team devoted to building its presence in India. At IGDC 2022 in Hyderabad, Telangana, we sat down with Arjun Varma, a manager at Xbox's new GXI (Global Expansion Incubator) team to talk all things ID@Xbox.

"The idea behind GXI is to engage and connect with the local developer community in India," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "We want to support and enable this ecosystem to find success. We're looking at how we can get these titles published on Xbox in addition to other platforms. The gaming industry has boomed in the last few years and India is a really interesting market for us. There's a lot of cool content coming out and we want to build on the potential that we're seeing."

"The gaming industry has boomed in the last few years and India is a really interesting market for us"

He tells us that Microsoft intends to give indie devs "the same tools and resources that Microsoft's biggest partners have access to."

It's a bold promise given how few developers make use of some of those tools and resources. For example, Crackdown 3's cloud-powered destructible environments required computational power far beyond the Xbox One's capabilities, so developer Sumo Digital relied on Microsoft Azure's servers to do some heavy lifting. The result was a multiplayer mode where players could raze entire buildings with rocket launchers and other explosives. However, this demonstration was a short-lived, as no other studio has since taken advantage of similar tech in their