This... is not good. Is this just for the XBox One, or is it for Series S/X as well?
Okay they're probably trying to move against everyone running emulators on their XBoxes because piracy or some crap, but surely there's some non-zero population of hobby devs using Dev Mode as intended? To play around with the hardware and console dev, regardless of whether or not they want to sell anything. I can imagine university game development classes would get great use out of a bunch of Series S as $300 devkits for projects that are never intended to be sold. Heck, that's why I want to get a Series S.
If I'm understanding this right, this new policy says people who buy Dev Mode access have 90 days, 3 months to build something and push it onto the store? That seems like an awfully short period of time to come up with a game idea, code it, polish it, go through all the steps developing a game, especially for one person who isn't doing game dev full time. Like you'd have to have most of your work done ahead of time and spend all of the time in Dev Mode doing XBox-specific tweaking. I can't imagine the deadline is good for creativity. Neither is the idea that your work has to go onto the store. Sometimes people just want to experiment and play around in private.
Dev Mode was good stuff, and I sure hope they go back on this, because otherwise I think it'll be useless to everyone except full-time devs. Which certainly seems to defeat the point of Dev Mode, opening up console dev to the masses.