Xbox indie parity clause is no more

Having suggested several times that it was no longer enforcing its indie game release parity policy, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has more or less confirmed its demise.

The company had previously required that indie games released for Xbox One arrive either at the same time or ahead of other platforms. The scheme was so controversial that some devs even said they wouldn’t release on Xbox One as a result.

However, having said last year that cases would be handled on a title-by-title basis and later that the policy was flexible, Spencer now seems to have signalled its end completely.

I think so,” he answered when asked by Edge if the parity clause is dead, as reported by GamesRadar. There’s this idea that’s been named ‘parity clause’, but there is no clause.

We’ve come out and been very transparent in the last four or five months about exactly what we want. If there’s a developer who’s building a game and they just can’t get the game done for both platforms – cool. We’ll take a staggered release. We’ve done it before, and we’ll work with them on that.

If another platform does a deal with you as a developer to build an exclusive version of your game for them, and you can’t ship on my platform for a year, when the game comes out in a year let’s just work together to make it special in some way.

People complained about that, but you did a deal with somebody else and you got paid for it and I’m happy – we do those same deals, so I’m not knocking you. It’s going to be better for you, actually, because people don’t want last year’s game, they want something special and new.”