Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Space Engineers for Xbox One

First of all, let me assure you that the development of Space Engineers for Xbox One won't affect the PC version.

In the past months, our team has silently grown. We have people who are dedicated to weekly updates, people who work on long-term features, people who work on our super-secret AI project and people who will work on Xbox One port.

On the other side, I must admit that I personally can’t be 100% focused on Space Engineers as I was when we started it. Now, my attention spans over many more areas.  But I believe we have the right people in the team for things to work. If nothing else; the last 6 months are proof that this already works.

We are not abandoning Steam or PC – this is where we started and we will continue here. The PC ecosystem has many advantages, from its openness, community of workshop creators (almost 40,000 creations!), to a starting modding community. Who would want to abandon this?

Porting to Xbox One was a logical choice, especially when you consider how close is the technology to the actual PC/Windows version.

12 months exclusivity relates to consoles only. PC version and possible other ports (eg. Mac, Linux, mobile, tablets) are unaffected by this.

Will the PC version get more console friendly? No. However at this moment it’s hard to predict what UI changes will be required when porting from PC to Xbox, but I doubt we will need to change the PC version because of console version. Why not customize only what’s needed by a target platform? If we won't find a way how to do modding on Xbox One, why would we remove this feature from the PC version? And the same applies to programmable modules and tons of other things.

If you have additional questions on how the Xbox One port will differ from PC version, what will be added, what will be missing, please wait until we get much closer to the release. At this moment, it’s too early to say anything.

Trust me, everything will be good.