XBOX ONE Game Dev is supposed to be hard.

So I recently took the plunge and joined the Xbox One Creators Program with Microsoft. It turns out that it's supposed to be incredibly hard to build these little games we see all the time, and for the most part, it is. Not only do we have to deal with the fact that the XBOX One does not use the stripped down PowerPC architecture that the Xbox360's used to run on, we now have to contend with the fact that it's basically running Windows 10. I remember the good old days when win32 and GDI (Graphics Device Interface) were sufficient to get a decent game running on a Windows PC - especially if the game wasn't too resource intensive. Then came Direct(X/3D/2D/11/12) with all its COM (Component Object Model) Glory -> which, perhaps most asinine of all -> is still being used today. Getting into the creators program costs a little bit of money, and that's mostly to keep the chancers out and cover administration fees. After that you really only need to abide by the store policies and be able to write a little bit of code, then you're sorted. With the advent of Xbox One-Friendly game engines, it's easier than ever to build an app that runs on a Windows 10 PC as well as the beloved Xbox One. I remember the good old days where things needed to be rewritten and recompiled to be able to run on different platforms . .when developing for a console required the teams to purchase a Dev-Kit (Development Kit containing an unlocked piece of console hardware) in order to be able to write their code. I remember when the costs were prohibitively expensive, and a simple guy - like myself - would never be able to justify spending that kind of cash on a hobby. I remember when it took teams of people to build an idea, a game, a concept, a business with big-budget marketing, in order to break-even on the Xbox Live Marketplace. I remember when NDA's (Non-Disclosure Agreement) had to be signed so as not to divulge the inner workings of the console. I remember . .. . These days it's stupidly easy to publish an app to the Microsoft Store, and by extension the Xbox Live Marketplace -> Step 1) Sign up for the creators program (this requires a small sum of money) Step 2) Peruse the numerous tutorials and reference materials Microsoft makes available online. Step 3) Build your desired game Step 4) Publish to the store Those are literally the steps, and Step 3 is simplified vastly if you use the Unity Game Engine with the Xbox Live plugin -> this abstracts away all the tedium of setting up your project keys to be included in your application. All in all, one could go from 0 all the way to Step 4 in a little under a week if they were motivated and had lots of spare time. So, yeah . . . I think I've found something that was supposed to be hard, that's been made incredibly easy along the way.