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Xbox is more expensive for developers too, as Microsoft bumps up dev kit cost [Eurogamer]
(www.eurogamer.net)
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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An indie developer doesn't really need these & it may not even be that easy to get one. It's tied to NDAs & you can use regular xbox consoles to test your own games.
I guess you are right. I was under the assumption every developer needs it. But it makes sense they don't as they can develop on the PC and just "export" it to Xbox. But why would a AAA developer need this then? They can develop (and I assume for the most part they do) on a PC as well and test the games on the regular console. Just curious.
I would assume that the devkit has more features to make developing easier, and testing on the Xbox console is probably a little janky without a devkit. Maybe it's the kind of solution that makes sense for a small studio, but doesn't scale up for a larger one?
I always thought the dev mode on each regular Xbox is used for development, that makes this thing easier to test. I know the specialized dev kits have more RAM capacity in example. I don't know how much involved and features they provide. Probably some sort of debuggers and the like... now that you mention features, it makes sense. Especially larger games do not have spare RAM and other stuff left to add the development tools on top of it.
Looks like my initial assumption is the entire opposite, this only affects AAA developers. lol.
I'm actually not sure who this affects. Initially I thought maybe you were right, until I considered that indie devs have this workaround. But I don't think AAA devs will be affected by this much, either, because they already have all the dev kits they need. I guess there's a possibility that a developer might want to make something bigger than ever for Xbox, but that possibility seems lower and lower every day. Even if they didn't raise the price on the devkits, we probably won't see another huge third party game come out for Xbox. When I think about something like GTA6, I think either they already have all the devkits they need to complete a port job, or else they will just skip releasing on Xbox entirely.
The dev kit probably has many debugging & logging features. It probably allows quick switching between the big Xbox & weak Xbox to test both without needing the deploy your game build twice.
Afaik you can only develop UWP apps on retail Xbox. Aka Windows Phone apps. Aka "those shitty programs with horrible UI that made Windows 8 everyone's favourite Windows version".