Introducing User Accounts and Development Accounts
This topic describes Xbox Developer Portal (XDP) user accounts, development accounts, and their relationship.
A person in your organization with Publisher Org Administration permission or Publisher Management permission creates user accounts for people in your organization. He or she also configures user accounts to provide access to your products and content by assigning users to access groups. For more information about access groups, see Introduction to Access Groups.
All XDP users can create development accounts associated with their user accounts. With a user account in an appropriate access group and a development account, a user has access to products and content.
There are two basic types of access:
Design-time
Access for uploading and configuring product content-or, more limitedly, for reading and viewing that content-via XDP in a web browser. Design-time access is correlated with access to product configuration in XDP. Your design-time access is determined by your user account XDP. For more information about design-time access, see Grant Design-Time Access.
Run-time
Access for running or playing products from a development kit console. Run-time access is correlated with access to instances of products in sandboxes. For run-time access, you use one of your development accounts. For more information about run-time access and creating a sandbox, see Grant Run-time Access.
To control which users and devices can access each of your Xbox One products during the development cycle, you configure the following entities:
User accounts
Each person who accesses your product files and information must have a personal Xbox One user account.
Note that though the credentials of the user account itself can be used for design-time access, they cannot be used for run-time access. For run-time access, users must supply the credentials of one of the development accounts associated with their user account.
The reason for using two separate kinds of accounts and credentials is to maintain a functional boundary that is both clear and secure-between ordinary XDP access on the one hand, and access to the testing environment of the development sandboxes on the other.
For more information, see Add a User Account and the User to an Access Group.
Development accounts
A development account is a special account that is created for and associated with an XDP user account. The credentials of the development account are used for run-time access to product builds in your Xbox One development sandboxes. Each user account may have one or more development accounts, or no development accounts at all.
Each development account must be associated with a user account, and user accounts can have zero or many associated development accounts. Many developers find it convenient to have multiple development accounts, because each development account can be managed separately. For example, having multiple development accounts can be useful for a developer who is working in multiplayer and matchmaking scenarios.
Each development account that is associated with an XDP user account is a real Microsoft account-the same sort of account that your customers will eventually use to access your released Xbox One content-and not the more limited MSA‑INT type of account that was used in previous versions of Xbox.
The only difference between a development account and an ordinary Microsoft account is that development accounts are granted additional privileges, including eligibility for access to your pre-release content located in development sandboxes. These additional privileges are provided through Xbox Live.
Note Development account credentials can be used to access product builds in development sandboxes only. They cannot be used to access sandboxes that contain certified or released products.
People who have XDP user accounts can create development accounts for themselves that are associated with their user accounts. In addition, people with user accounts in an access group that has either the Publisher Org Administration permission or the Publisher Management permission can manage access for other people.
Development accounts can be created in batches of up to 999 accounts.
For more information, see Create Development Accounts for an XDP User Account.
Trusted devices
A trusted device is an Xbox One development kit that you have added to your XDP organization by provisioning it.
For more information about provisioning and adding a development kit, see “Enabling Your Dev Kit Entitlement” in the Xbox One XDK documentation.