My first major memory of Indie Games on Xbox platforms is a pleasant one, and it’s precisely the sort of memory I feel most appropriate for the medium. This was a tiny self-published affair – nary a publisher in sight, what I assume was a solo developer, and an extremely limited scope. I’m not talking about Hollow Knight, or Balatro, or Braid, or Limbo or what have you. I’m talking about Curling 2010.
Curling 2010 was exactly what it sounds like: a very simple indie recreation of the sport of curling. It was a drunken discovery, and in my circle of friends was almost exclusively played competitively when very liquored. To me, Curling stood alongside Mount your Friends as the absolute poster children of Xbox Live Indie Games, a rather brilliant little service that allowed pretty much anyone to develop Xbox 360 games using Microsoft’s XNA framework. Games would get peer reviewed and then could go live for a few bucks.
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This service was surprisingly simple, shockingly democratised, and was the first signal of how serious Xbox was about allowing independent developers access to its platform; they let one person indulge their interest in Curling and put their game on Xbox 360.
While Xbox Live’s Community Indie games service never left the Xbox 360 and Microsoft never quite embraced such chaotic openness again, that system’s founding spirit was later channeled into Xbox One’s ID@Xbox program, which continues to this day. In 2025, ID@Xbox has seldom seemed more important to Xbox’s fortunes. The platform holder finds itself in choppy waters: first-party studio layoffs, second-party game cancellations, botched rescue deals and boycott calls fuelled by the actions of Xbox’s parent company. But you know what part of the Xbox ecosystem has been consistently rather good? ID@Xbox.