Slashdot Mirror
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."
Oh, I'm sorry, I read that as "Instead of learning how to actually code, people will get to put half-baked designs onto the market!"
Browsing with classic discussion, noscript, at -1 and nested
no hidden comments and I only mod UP
This is pretty ridiculous. MicroSoft wages a constant war against open-source applications, and they've obviously begun to realize that FOSS is potentially useful in games, too. The mod community in Half-Life is probably the most obvious example - some originally free mods wound up getting commercial releases (although still were free to download), and returned in HL2 as paid products. But of course, rather than just make your console that much more appealing by letting developers jump on, a move that would get lots of talent from people who want to show off for XBox 360 fans as well as PC gamers, MS is actively charging anybody who wants to give them free intellectual property, and making it harder for that property to distribute anyways. (TFA: "The games created with XNA Game Studio Express will not initially be available to regular Xbox 360 users" but may eventually enjoy a wider release, or at least the popular ones will.) So the monolithic overlords of Windows, and now gaming (they hope), want us to pay them a subscription to make games for their platform, and even if we do, nobody but other devs will be able to play them? Sounds like somebody's combined a great money-making scheme with a shitty implimentation of game development.