The Xbox One is soon to become a much more accessible machine that what it has been up until today. When I say accessible, what I am referring to is the fact that indie game/app developers will now have the ability to work on projects within the console without needing the Xbox One Dev kit. Also, regular users will be able to use their console to chat with Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant too.
Up until recently, the only way you could develop anything on the console involved jumping through hoops to gain access to the Dev Kit. Of course, this upset many indie developers of course as they were made to feel like second class citizens when compared with AAA developers.
With Xbox One moving to Windows 10 and Microsoft pushing ‘single platform’ which includes Xbox One, PC’s, laptops, tablets and phones of course, there was really no sense anymore in the previous development access system. Developers can now turn any retail Xbox One into a dev kit quite easily. There is a preview update now available.
So, here is the how: After downloading and installing the dev mode on the Xbox One, you can then register your console as a development kit. Once this is done you can then launch the ‘Dev Mode’ app. This is also a good way to preview Universal Windows platform apps too.
It’s also worth noting that you can find plenty of tutorials for turning the retail Xbox One into a dev kit, but Microsoft always warned against this, and noted that while you could use this method to bring up the development kit menu on the console, this “does not turn the console into a development kit.”
Xbox 360 was a major platform for indie developers, with breakthrough successes like Super Meat Boy, Fez and Braid getting released on the Xbox 360 and PC first. But things changed quite a bit with the Xbox One. Ever since Microsoft launched the Xbox One console, they promised they would be allowing any developer to develop apps for it, eventually.
It looks like they have finally put their money where their mouths are.