Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut Is The First Indie Game Launching On Xbox One

The ID@Xbox program has 25 games slated for release very “soon”. What you probably didn't know was that the very first game to kick off Microsoft's indie game initiative on the Xbox One was Born Ready Games' Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut.

Born Ready Games made it known in a recent press notice that Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut – the Kickstarted mecha space game – will be the inaugural title to welcome in the age of the Xbox One's ID@Xbox self-publishing program.

Strike Suit Zero doesn't release until April 8th, next week for both the Xbox One and the PS4, but press are receiving early copies of the game so they can have reviews primed and ready to go live for the launch.

More than anything, this basically gives us a prime window of when additional independent titles being self-published for the Xbox One will appear on the store page. Perhaps Strike Suit Zero will be one of many games to launch on the store for Microsoft's third-generation Xbox. However, the press note makes it clear that the SSZ: Director's Cut will be launching alone on April 8th for the Xbox One, because it is “the first title” from the ID@Xbox cache to launch.

This leaves 24 more games to launch for the Xbox One as part of the first wave of ID@Xbox titles coming to the system.

Of course, Microsoft is still trailing badly behind its two direct competitors in this eighth generation of home console gaming. Nintendo really outfitted the Wii U with plenty of awesome offerings in the indie sector after their head of talent and developer relations went out of his way to secure all sorts of Kickstarter projects and up-and-comers with the Unity Pro developer registration program. The Wii U has some the best indies come out for the system this year and more than 100 games expected to drop before 2014 is out... in the indie sector alone.

Not to be outdone by the Big 'N', Sony secured the services of more than a thousand independent developers and, they too, also have more than 100 games guaranteed to launch within 2014 for the PS4.

The Xbox One is the only new generation system that's kind of thin on the indie relations front, but with Phil Spencer now head of the Xbox division, things could be turning around for the Micro 'S', assuming this is where they begin to focus their efforts, especially with Sony gunning for games like Rust and DayZ on the PS4.

Nevertheless, something is better than nothing and it's good to see that at least Microsoft managed to recover the no-self-publishing clause from last year and reverse the policy so we can at least start getting indie games on the Xbox One. And it all starts with Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut launching next week, on April 8th.