Xbox lead thinks "we have been in a golden age for indies" since 2008, and it's "a fantastic time to be a developer" if you ignore all the smoke: "The present is awesome"

Awesome. No, really, perfect. Seriously… it's great. Everything about the video game industry right now is great, ID@Xbox director Chris Charla tells GamesRadar+ at the Game Developer Conference 2026, and especially when it comes to indie games.

That latter point is inarguable – indie games seem to keep outperforming the most megalithic budget, with titles like Mewgenics, which acted as the highest-rated game of 2026 at one serendipitous point, or Slay the Spire 2, which destroyed its release date competition on Steam the way a mouse destroys a block of Swiss cheese. The rest of the games industry doesn't seem quite as lucky.

Xbox itself is turbulent, having had thousands of layoffs in 2025 ahead of the more recent leadership changes at Microsoft that saw Xbox lead Phil Spencer replaced with new CEO Asha Sharma. But Charla assures us "the future is going to be awesome," and, actually, "the present is awesome, too."

He explains, "We're in a golden age for indies, and we've been in a golden age for indies for almost 20 years. That summer of arcade in 2008 with Castle Crashers and Limbo – that ushered in a golden age that just hasn't stopped. And the creativity you see downstairs from developers from all over the world, from all different places in their development journey – first game, fifth game – is, like, it's unbelievable."

"We're just living through one of the best times there is to be a player, and, you know, a fantastic time to be a developer," Charla says. "And whatever we can do as Xbox to help that and to help developers do that, and to keep this golden age going, we're gonna do."

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