ID@Xbox: "Hundred and hundreds" of indies signed up in first three hours

Microsoft's new indie publishing scheme has been a roaring success so far, according to Phil Spencer.

"In the first three hours, we had hundreds and hundreds of developers sign up," the Microsoft Game Studios vice president told GameInformer.

While Spencer admitted that not everybody "loves" Microsoft, he insisted that the platform holder has "always" had a "strong" relationship with the indie development community.

"If you look at the flow of content during the 360 generation and some of the indie hits that debuted on console on 360, people were clearly investing in putting their games on our platform," he said.

That's not going to change, he added, noting that the removal of the distinction between Xbox Live Indie Games and Xbox Live Arcade just means everyone is treated equally.

"We want to have a platform that all of the great game developers can target. We have to be able to support that," he said.

The first application responses for ID@Xbox went out this week.

One other interesting note from the interview regarding indies was a comment on cloud support for smaller developers.

"If you're a two-person studio, you're probably not going to invest in a server farm. You won't know how many to buy or what the scale is going to look like. It's really hard for those guys," Spencer said.

"What we're able to do with Cloud, is say, 'Here are 300,000 servers. You don't need to tell us what that demand looks like. You don't even have to know.' We will handle the scaling capability on the backend. That has been one of the more interesting uses."

The full interview contains further discussion of the Xbox One's launch and other miscellany; check it out through the link above.