Its been in Beta for a few months now, but with the final release of XNA Game Studio Express, you can now launch your games on a retail 360, provided you pay £50 a year to join the creators club. The software allows you to target both Windows PCs and the 360 with the same code, using a combination of the .NET framework and the new XNA framework, and you have to be willing to write in C#. For now there are a number of limitations – while you can share a windows executable with anyone you care to, the only way you can share your 360 version is to release the entire source code for your game. Peter Moore’s soundbite “Youtube for games” would only really apply if sharing a video on youtube involved sending Youtube all of the people, props, background music, lights and script for your little movie. On top of that, only people paying the £50 subscription can actually boot your game up. That said it has the potential to grow into exactly what he suggested.

Personally, I think this is a particularly interesting move by Microsoft. Xbox live arcade has had some success, but is let down by a lack of quality content. There is a huge community of talented people out there that love games and are drawn to creating games on consoles (look at the efforts some go to in order to get homebrew running on various devices). By dramatically lowering the barrier to entry and (siginificantly) making it easy for those with more of a visual eye to get their content into their own creations (the XNA content pipeline) they’ve done well to sow the seeds for the sprouting of the “next big thing” on their platform. Combine that with the huge appeal to universities currently running games development courses and the fact that a lot of people in a couple of years will leave their courses utterly familiar with the 360, it will be an interesting one to watch, and certainly one that I’m already having fun playing around with.

Update: Gamasutra have an interview with Dave Mitchell discussing the future of XNA GSE, worth a read.