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Microsoft To Enable User-Created Xbox 360 Games
simoniker writes "Talking on the eve of its Gamefest event in Seattle, Microsoft has revealed XNA Game Studio Express, a new product which will allow indie developers and students to develop simultaneously on Xbox 360 and PC, and share their games to others in a new Xbox 360 'Creators Club'. XNA Game Studio Express will be available for free to anyone with a Windows XP-based PC, and will provide them with what's described as "Microsoft's next-generation platform for game development." In addition, by joining a "creators club" for an annual subscription fee of $99, users will be able to build, test and share their games on Xbox 360, as well as access a wealth of materials to help speed the game development progress."
If this is anything like the UT2004 'Make Something Unreal' its quite possible that this is going to fragment the playing community into small non-viable sub-communities.
E.g. Alien Swarm has about 4 decent servers, and a community of 100 players.
But this seems like a good idea in many ways. I'm a bit taken aback that MicroSoft is doing something to let hobbists flex their creative muscle, especially in such a (relatively) open way. I mean, development for X-Box and PC? That's a pretty sweet deal.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure a lot of the games will probably suck eggs, but it might just turn out that we'd see some real innovation in design and concept with an infusion of fresh development blood. Because you never know, one of those hobbists/indie designers might crank out something good enough to either a) get picked up by an existing studio or b) generate enough interest from others to start up their own studio. Then it just becomes a matter of being a good enough businessman to keep things working.
The XNA site they have a FAQ that doesn't really address my big question: If you create a game using XNA and distribute it to the community, who owns it? Are you forced into a licensing agreement? If so, is it one closer to the GPL or Microsoft's? This is very interesting because Microsoft may be claiming publishing rights to these games in the TOS for XNA.
So it could be a standard American Idol style:
1) trick contestants into signing away all rights they have to their work
2) let the community decide who is the best
3) publish their work and profit!
If you have preliminary questions about the XBox 360, you can find it on their forums.
My work here is dung.
They're probably going to make your game run under .net as managed code. Good luck doing anything worthwhile from a low level or systems point of view under that framework.
Ian Ameline
The current announcements don't seem to spell out that this is based on .NET, but I'm sure it is. Microsoft has mentioned before that getting .NET on the XBox 360 was part of XNA. Also, see this FiringSquad article. They mention that 95 to 99 percent of the code from the windows version of a game could be retained in the X360 version. Also:
Managed code seems like the only reasonable way to enforce this security.
Your array will be flagged as data in memory, and is thus non-executable. It won't work.
Well, the good news, is that the Nintendo Wii Dev Kit will cost somewhere around $1700. That's not too bad a price, considering the PS3 kit is rumoured to cost between $30,000 and $50,000. I'm not sure how much the full dev kit on the XBox 360 goes for. I think this could open up a lot of possiblities for the Wii. You get the full dev kit for under $2000. Not some rinky dink homebrew version, the whole thing. At this price, there could be WiiNux before we know it. And it would probably sell if it offered good multimedia functionality to the Wii, such as playing downloaded movies, and Linux games. Although I don't think Nintendo would let that fly, as people would just install an emulator, and play the Old NES games for free instead of paying for them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm hoping that the PS3 (as has been suggested) ships with a decent and usable version of Linux. That opens the possibility of using the PS3 for almost any functionality, not just games. Of course Sony have screwed things up in the past, so I don't hold a great deal of confidence in what they might offer. Still, the Microsoft thing looks like some cheezy game development kit which only produces games that you can share with other developers. Doesn't sound very compelling to me.
I just wanted to add that, ironically, if you want to do development using a very popular "indie-level" game engine you would choose the Torque engine. And to use it, you pay them $100. If you want their studio tools on top of that, it's another 100$.
The new MS-XNA Game Studio is based on this Torque engine. When you pay your $100, you also get additional content downloads, the studio package, listing on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA), etc. etc. These are pretty decent extras, and it's cheaper than just using Torque!
There are obvious reasons Microsoft is doing this, but my feeling is that positives outweigh the negatives.
It's easy to make fun of Ballmer, but remember that he's *exactly* right here. MS has always made the development tools cheap and available.
Many years ago, I worked in a university department that mostly ran OS/2. This was back in the days of the OS/2 Workplace Shell and NT 3.5- OS/2 was in many ways vastly more sophisticated than NT. Queue up NT4- I went by the campus bookstore one day to look at software.
Sitting on one shelf was the OS/2 dev kit. ~$500, academic price. Then you needed OS/2 with the TCP/IP stack, which was another $200. Both were in ugly boxes to boot.
The other shelf had Visual Studio C++. $99. Came with a *free*, *full* copy of NT4. Nice pretty box. I knew at that instant OS/2 was doomed. $99 is an impulse purchase, even for college students. Hey, why not give it a try? $700, not so much.
Let's move up to today. You've got this. You have Visual Studio Express: free. Student prices for VStudio are still dirt cheap, and my understanding is that the development kits for XBox aren't really all that much compared to Nintendo/Sony's.
MS gets it, or at least some small part of it.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Gamasutra
So, Sony has never once said you would be able to, except when they did.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
I don't think we'll need an official toolchain for the wii. There is an actively maintained multi-platform open source homebrew toolchain for GameBoy Advance, GP32, Playstation Portable, GameCube and Nintendo DS here. Adding support for the wii will just be a matter of time. Actually the guys already opened up an IRC channel for the wii, even though there's probably not much coding going on yet :)
With apologies to Ford, Microsoft is making a pretty bold move by essentially embracing the homebrew community. Some may not want to pay the $99 bucks to be able to share their games, but this sure beats the heck out of the constant arms race that is usually waged between console makers and people want to run homebrew or pirated software. One could also argue though, that this is a desperate move by Microsoft to spur more Xbox 360 development. But given that Microsoft on the whole has always been developer friendly and makes some of the best development tools in the business (at least for Microsoft platforms), I suspect that this was always a part of their plan. For me personally, this is a dream come true! I've always wanted the chance to write something for a console, but the price in money, for professional kits, or effort, for the homebrew console scene, has been too great. I've twiddled a bit on the PC, but consoles are where the real action is right now.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
They are both open. If you compare them to the console market. If you compare them to the PC market, they will both be very closed. The thing is that consoles are now powerful enough to handle most home computing tasks. This means that if people move over to the consoles for home computing, they will be ripe for vendor lock in, given that the entire console industry is predicated on making money with vendor lock in. Just pay attention to the number of times you hear the statement "It's their system, so they can do what they want." in reference to console makers. Anti-competative and anti-consume behavior that would never be tolorated in the PC world are not only allowed in the console world, but embraced by many of the console fanboys.