At long last, I will finally be able to say without any caveats that Axiom Verge is playable on your favorite console. I will soon be able to say that whether your primary platform is Steam, PS4, Wii U, or now Xbox One, Axiom Verge is available. When will I be able to say this? The final piece of the console puzzle, the Xbox One version, will launch on Friday, September 30 – a mere 2 weeks from now! Mark your calendars and tell your friends! Like with the other platforms, it will be $19.99, but it will have a 10% introductory discount through October 10.

There’s a certain irony that Xbox One is the last console to get Axiom Verge. When I started development almost 7 years ago, Xbox 360 (in particular, the Xbox Live Indie Games service) was my target platform. Like many indie developers, I vastly underestimated the scope of what the game would eventually become and the time needed to achieve my full vision, and by the time I was ready to launch, the development framework I was using (XNA) was no longer compatible with Xbox’s latest system.

For anyone interested in a history lesson, XNA was developed by Microsoft as a free set of APIs for independent developers to use to create games for consoles – without the need for expensive development hardware. At the time, this idea was revolutionary. Consoles were always the domain of large companies with big budgets. Development kits ran tens of thousands of dollars, so hobbyists, or even small studios, could never afford to develop games for consoles without a publisher who could provide the necessary hardware and software. XNA made it possible for anyone with access to a simple PC to develop games that could be released on a console.

But it was often more than that. Although consumers probably saw a lot of low quality shovelware clogging up XBLIG (opening the floodgates does let some sewage through), to XBLIG developers, it was about community and developers helping each other. A lot of talent cut their teeth on XBLIG. Ska Studios first achieved notoriety with their title I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1. Now you may know them better as the developer of Salt and Sanctuary.

In fact, James Silva, who was the sole member of Ska Studios until his wife Michelle joined him and turned it into a 2-person company, wrote a book about making games with XNA. James Petruzzi and Tim Dodd used that book to learn how to make games for XBLIG. In case you’re not familiar with James and Tim, they’re the people behind the upcoming metroidVANIA, Chasm. (Incidentally, Chasm and Axiom Verge share something else in common. Dan Adelman is handling the biz dev and marketing for both games, and we often show our titles together. This was our setup at PAX East – sorry for the potato quality.