Over the years, we've occasionally heard a grumble-or-two from independent developers about how bringing their games to the Xbox platform has been unnecessarily difficult, and how they've felt like they're jumping through hoops.

In a statement published this week, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet mentions that the team have "heard the feedback from developers", and they agree that it should be easier to publish those titles.

As a result, he's outlined a few steps that are being implemented to make this better:

"We’ve heard the feedback from developers: bringing a game to XBOX should be easier than it is today. We agree, and we’re working to make it better. We care deeply about ID@XBOX and the developers who build for XBOX. We’re starting with some of the areas we know can create unnecessary friction, including our concept and publishing processes, and simplifying them so developers can spend less time navigating process and more time bringing great games to players. More soon."

This is also a topic that was apparently brought up by Xbox boss Asha Sharma at a recent Microsoft HQ meeting, telling employees that the ultimate goal is to simplify publishing across Xbox consoles and PC.

Here's a direct quote from Sharma, as shared by Windows Central:

"Right now, it is simply very hard to work with Xbox," Sharma admitted. "So, we are simplifying the targets, we're moving to a headless partner center, we're taking the cruft out of our APIs, and we're making them machine-readable. There's a lot of work here. We need developers to be able to work with us, understand how they are performing, and have tools that actually grow their business. There's a lot we can do here. I'm encouraged by the work happening."

Clearly, this is a big focus of the team at Xbox right now, and here's hoping it leads to more and more great games being published across the platform in the months and years to come.

Van Vliet also mentioned in a follow-up post that he'll be reviewing whether something needs to be done about Xbox review codes, responding to someone who suggested they're often available later than codes for other platforms.

To be honest, the review code situation has picked up a lot in recent years based on our experience, but it's true that a lot of multi-platform games get reviewed on PS5 rather than Xbox, and we'd love to see more parity going forward.

What are your thoughts on this? Let us know down in the comments section below.