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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."
Now I can finally work on that "ringworld" game I've been kicking around in my head...
.... "Linux kernel"
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This could be a killer feature.
:).
There's so many extremely simple games that are insanely fun multiplayer, and will probably never, ever be released as stand-alone games.
I'm still praying the Nintendo Wii will be opened up like this, but if it isn't, this might be what tips me over to XBOX 360. Programming for the Wii-controllers would be fun though, and I really, really want to play Pong with them
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
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.
Now, someone please extract the binary signing key from this "XNA Game Studio Express".
Since Microsoft won't be getting a cut of the games in question, and developer goodwill isn't exactly something they've had trouble getting behind the 360, what exactly would they get from just opening up the development platform?
I believe they were charing significantly more for the full scale developers kit/package which companies like EA Sports and such buy into. This makes a "tinkering/homebrew" entry point into that arena for what is only the cost of a couple games.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Developers, Developers, Developers.
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.
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.
What a great educational tool! What got me into programming was a kid was the fact that I could make games very similar in quality to my Atari games on our old 386. I wonder if they'll offer an API simple enough for beginners to pick up.
~Ben
$100 a year does seem a little steep for this service at first glance, and correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't it cost big bucks (like hundreds of thousands of dollars) for professional studios to get a liscence to develop games for consoles? The advantage for them is that their games are guaranteed to get published, but if this service allows students and independant developers to get their games out there in the Xbox 360 commmunity and if these developers are allowed to keep the rights to their products, then I think it is an excellent way for aspiring developers to get started in the industry, whether they get picked up by existing studios or start their own.
This could be a giant step for the game industry. Kudos to Microsoft.
Instead of paying additional XBOX game developers a salary, MS is going to ask XBOX developers to pay *them*?
Brilliant. I'm going to start a company right away, and I'll make sure to hire lots of developers to pay me.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
The comments in this thread show that, when MS does something good, Slashdot (with the exception of a few idiots) heaps on the praise.
By charging a subscription fee you can have your cake and eat it too. Garage developers can make AND RUN their homebrew software for a fairly low cost $100 really isn't that much, and the subscription fee lets MS allow that kind of development without breaking their profit model, essentially making up the money they're "loosing" by not selling you games.
while it might be a bit more expensive then chipping your console a lot of people will opt for the legal route if available. Not to mention I can see a whole lot of non-developers signing up just to run the homebrew stuff made by the real developers. I'll tell you what, if they make an XBMC360 and it's availble on this thing, I'll pay the $100 a year to run that and other software, weather I'm developing my own software or not. I would imagine there will be a lot of other people in the same boat. MS basically found a way to allow homebrew software and turn a profit at the same time... crafty buggers.
Collector's Edition
Companies tend to have these low-cost barriers to entry simply to keep every random person with a game idea from throwing stuff onto their development site. In addition, if it's free, one is more likely to sign up, piddle around and then never create anything. At least with a small entry fee there is a slight financial incentive for you to actually go through with creating and deploying something. To me, $99 is nothing, but it seems like this is targeted at younger kids in their late teens/early twenties. Depending on your family's financial background, $99 is a lot of money to a student with little to no income stream and will ensure that you at least have a vested interest in their program.
Weight Watchers (the only example I can think of right now) has the same principle. They charge you $10-12 a week for their program whether you attend or not. They don't really do anything but weigh you and give you some rah-rah speeches to keep you motivated. The financial cost is there because, psychologically, people who have a vested financial interest in something tend to follow through with it more often and more completely.
... on how long it will take someone to make a program that wrecks 360s.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
From the XNA FAQ:
Q: How exactly can I share my 360 game to other 360 users? Will my game only be available to people with the XNA "Creators Club" subscription? Will it be available to all 360 users that have an Xbox Live account?
A: There is currently no supported way to share binaries on the Xbox 360. Currently, there are four requirements that must be met in order to share a game targeting Xbox 360 which is developed with XNA Game Studio Express.
1. The individual you are planning to share the game with must be logged in to Xbox Live and have an active subscription to the XNA Creators Club
2. The receiving user must have downloaded the XNA Framework runtime environment for the Xbox 360
3. The receiving user must have XNA Game Studio Express installed on their own development PC
4. The game project, including all source and content assets, must be shared with the receiving user. The receiving user then compiles and deploys the game to their Xbox 360.
Doesnt exactly sound like a barrel of laughs to distribute to friends etc...
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk
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!"
> The financial cost is there because, psychologically, people who have a vested financial interest in something tend to follow through with it more often and more completely.
Haha. Nonsense. The financial cost is there because they want to make money of desperate fat people!
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk
Chairface Chippendale?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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
My bet is that the most open system will win.
One of the consequences of FOSS is that now everyone wants everything for free. God forbid you pay for a library! What's with the sense of entitlement here?
MS has a brand image to keep with the Xbox. To allow unfettered distribution of homebrew is a disaster. Remember that there are certain types of content that MS would rather keep off Xboxes, even if it wasn't authorized or endorsed by MS. Adult games, games featuring direct explicit illegalities... knowing the internet and YouTube, we have an immense ability to create content that the Xbox brand does NOT want to be associated with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with MS wanting control of distribution, if only for this purpose alone.
So the idea will be to put a crutch on homebrew distribution, so that MS can pick the cream of the crop for official endorsement, and probably un-handicap the game for full XBLA distribution, free or otherwise. This will allow you and your buddies to have fun throwing pr0n and other shenanigans on the Xbox360, but disallow you from doing any real damage through mass distribution.
And what's with the "XP only" game development? It's the .NET Framework for cryin' out loud. *AND* it's Managed DirectX! This concerns Linux/UNIX zealots none. We're not talking about a C++ library for OpenGL here, this thing simply *cannot* run in 'nix. The Xbox360 runs DX only, and one of the concepts here is getting rid of complex C++ and throwing in simpler C#, none of these quite fit with 'nix eh (Mono doesn't count)?
Do you seriously think MS is intending on sucking $100/year out of every developer? Are you seriously believing that MS intends the subscription fee to be a profitable industry? There won't be enough devs out there for this to be anything but a drop in the bucket to MS. I suspect the fee is more of a barrier to entry requirement to keep your everyday kids out and encourage some serious development - without setting the price as high as to keep interested (and qualified) parties out.
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.
why all the hate?
did you guys say "oh great now we can have shitty mods" when the iD guys gave access to the WAD files?
How about when Valve let people have access to the half-life engine? Isn't counterstrike still the most played online game? I'm willing to bet that a serious portion of the half life cds have been sold just to play counterstrick.
What happened to the guys who made the Desert Combat mod for BF1942? Oh yeah, they got hired by the company and improved the game.
Look at the success of Xbox Live Arcade. You have a plethora of PC game developers making games and selling them on the Xbox system. These are all guys who could never make console games in the past.
MS made a bunch of tools to help developers make their PC games work on 360 and vice versa.
So now MS wants to let even more people in, and you guys bitch about it? Why because you have to pay $99? or because some kid will make a donkey kong clone with steve jobs and bill gates? or because you have to have a 360?
I'm willing to bet that some kick ass games come out as a result of this. Maybe some kid gets hired by a company and makes a truly kick ass game like Geometry Wars. Maybe some game comes out and gets noticed and picked up for Arcade. Who knows.
If you dont want to do it, keep the $99 in your pocket. But only good stuff can come out of this.
It will be an extended version of Visual C# 2005 express. That's right, it's all C#... sigh, ah well, guess I'll stick to my pc and visual c++
Here's the FAQ: http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/faq/