Cool XBOX software development news

Some very exciting news for XBOX360 game development, especially for people (like myself) who like to tinker. Read this TeamXBOX article XNA Game Studio Express: Power to the Gamers!

Here is a snip of more information from NeoGAF regarding the XNA news:

The beta released at the end of the month will be just on the PC. The release version (at the end of the year) will let anyone with a "creator's club" membership ($99 per year) create builds on their PC to run on their Xbox 360. You'll basically take your Xbox 360 on the same local network as your PC, set it to listen for a code dump from your PC running the Game Studio Express, and then on your PC you hit the 'ol "compile and run on 360" thing. Very similar to the actual pro development environment, only it works on retail 360s (on the same local network, provided you have a creator's club membership activated on that console).


You can share your games to anyone else in the creator's club. Just send the XNA project to them in email, on a memory key, put it up on your site for download, whatever. They load it up on their PC in their copy of XNA Game Studio Express, and send it to their Xbox.


The goal is that, in the future, they'll have a channel for people who are not members of the creator's club to download and play the homebrew games. Like, there's Live Aracade, and there will be Creator's Arcade or some such. Anyone in the creator's club would theoretically be able to submit to Creator's Arcade and MS would examine it to make sure it's not really a pirate game or won't harm your Xbox, then they put it up for everyone to download and check out. That aspect of it is a little further out (think next year) and they're still working on details like ownership and copyright, how they'll examine submissions for safety, etc.

Game Stuio Express won't include the stuff to let your game do online multiplayer over Live - that's reserved for the full XNA Studio.

Garage Games is porting all their Torque stuff (Torque game builder and the full Torque engine and tools) over to XNA to run in managed code and getting great performance, so they say. So that's a full game engine you can get for cheap to use with XNA Game Studio Express, if you want.

All in all, it's a super positive move to enabling homebrew - even dramatically supporting homebrew - on a major console. It's more support than I can remember any other major player giving the indie and homebrew scene. Clearly it doesn't totally open the console so it's the wild west like the PC is, but the barrier seems pretty low to me. I'm interested to see where it goes.