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The final piece in the XNA puzzle – Indie gaming on XBox 360

xna.jpegMicrosoft keynote has finally completed the circle of its “YouTube for games” plan by opening up the distribution channel for indie game studios and hobbyists on the XBox 360 platform. From this Autumn, games created using XNA Game Studio Express can be submitted to the Creators Club community for peer review. This community will vet your game and if it gets approved it will be available to anyone with an XBox 360 and an internet connection. Obviously this is a huge step for hobbyists and microstudios – its the first time the barrier between such creators and consumers has been completely removed. It will still require the circa-£50 annual subscription to get you membership of the Creators Club and allow you to submit your game (which seems like a very ill-thought out move when comparing the revenue they get from this stream compared with the amount of additional content that could be generated if they removed this boundary, although they have announced free membership for students).

Its not just for those making freebie games either – a revenue stream is set to be announced in the near future, allowing people to charge for their game (presumably in microsoft points, and with MS getting a fair cut).

They also announced the news that everyone has been waiting for – you can now create your own games for the worlds most popular MP3 player… the Zune.

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Comments

At one stroke Microsoft have removed all the barriers to game development and more importantly to game publishing. We will have a flowering of innovation and creativity beyond anything the game industry has ever seen before. Probably beyond what any creative industry has ever seen before. The last explosion in gaming creativity was the bedroom Sinclair Spectrum coders in the 1980s (we have been going downhill creatively ever since), this will be thousands of times bigger. The possibilities are infinite.

Now I’ve got a “bussiness” reason the get a 360, most excellent.

Ooh interesting. Wonder if its any good? Looks like a competitor for Ogre certainly (and with a less restrictive license for PS3 dev) and might offer a bit more than XNA’s bare-bones renderer. I saw something at Devstation a couple of years back where some of the SCEE R&D guys had some scenegraph libary running that looked quite interesting. Very modular. They had some demo of a weird monkey running around some egyptian pyramids with some bizzare l-system trees. Maybe its morphed into this? Hopefully MS’s XNA announcements will put pressure on Sony to follow suit and produce a content delivery system as well as the tools. Great to see a war being fought on open access to consoles.

btw – for those playing with XNA GSE, the XNA renderer for Axiom is nearly done – http://axiomengine.sourceforge.net/ which should provide those with OGRE experience with a tasty rendering library.

Exciting times indeed, maybe we’ll be targeting “The Big Three” with our digital toys in the near future.

(Just googled to make sure my reference makes sense and to clarify I mean the three dominant consoles, not the big three diseases)

I was there for this keynote speech at GDC and there was no mention of how indies will actually make money doing this. It is neat that anyone can make a game and put it up but, c’mon…we’ve been able to do that on the Web for years. Is MS going to let me sell my stuff on Xbox Live? I didn’t hear that at all. All I heard was that I could get distribution if I passed peer review. Show me the money!!

  • jim

I think the only mention was on the XNA blog. In their words:

“Most of you are now probably asking, “Can I make money off of this?” Well, the answer is “Yes!”. While we don’t have all the specific details (the lawyers are huddled in the corner, making serious faces and muttering incomprehensibly, so we have to wait for their final word), we can at least tell you a few juicy tidbits:
1) We will offer different revenue sharing models to let you sell (or give away) your game. We will announce more complete details on this prior to the retail consumer launch this holiday season.”

Presumably this means you choose a price point in MS points like all other Live marketplace content, and you get paid a percentage of what its sold for (maybe in MS points also, that you can cash in?).

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