Xbox One developers can port Windows 8 games easily onto the console, says Microsoft

Xbox director of development Boyd Multerer has said porting a game from Windows 8 onto Xbox One is easy for developers: if s studio can write a game in DirectX on PC, the team already knows how to "write a game in Xbox One."

Speaking in the latest issue of OXM, Multerer said Xbox One was designed in such a manner for ease of development.

"The basic box is definitely easier to develop for, and that goes a long way," he said. "We spent a lot of time making sure that if you know how to write a game in DirectX in Windows, you already know how to write a game in Xbox One, and the games that are being written for Windows 8 that are using DX are porting really quickly to Xbox One. Like often in a day, maybe two, because the APIs are that similar.

"Yes, you have to tweak for the specific performance characteristics of this box, but you basically already know how to do it, if you've developed for Windows. In reality, everything's more complicated than that, but yeah.

"I think that the Indies are going to find the Xbox One to be a fantastic platform. I ran the Microsoft XNA Framework, and I care tremendously about the indies, and as we were designing the Xbox One, one of my goals was to bake in support for independent developers really deeply into the operating system, so that when we did get to this part of the conversation, it's going to flow pretty naturally."

Microsoft recently announced 25 new indie titles in development for Xbox One through the company's ID@Xbox program.