It looks like the folks over at Microsoft have decided to take a step – a painful one at that, but necessary as all good things must eventually come to an end, through the shutting down of the Indie Games program for the aging Xbox 360 console. From today onward, developers are unable to purchase or renew annual memberships in the program. It must be noted, however, that active developers could very well continue to work on their games until September 9 next year. When that date arrives, all publishing to the Indie Games Marketplace on the Xbox 360 platform will no longer happen.
As for consumers, things are not that bleak as compared to developers since games on the Indie Marketplace will continue to be available for purchase until it closes, which Microsoft has given a time frame of somewhere “around September 2017.” Following that, “around November 2017,” Microsoft will give out a final payment to all indie game participants for their hard work, regardless of whether they actually met the $150 minimum payment threshold or not.
Indie games for the Xbox One has been around for some time now, but definitely not as long as for the Xbox 360 since that happens to be the predecessor console in the overall scheme of things.
Filed in . Read more about Microsoft and Xbox 360. Source: xboxforums.create.msdn