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August 14, 2006
M(s)XNA
M(s)XNA: Sounds like a blog aggregator, I know, but it's actually a game-development wrinkle from Microsoft. I've read multiple FAQs, blogposts and forum posts, and I think this is the story: "Now we'll give anyone free Visual Studio extensions for game development on Windows XP, and for $99/year your XBox can view such non-commercial games too." (Apologies to MS staff if I got this wrong, but I tried to read for the meat in the varied announcements.) From reading the MS materials it sounds like they're trying to train a larger development base; the missing question seems to be "Who can view this stuff I write?" Here's the XNA FAQ and a different XNA FAQ... the latter has a Q describing how anyone viewing your work must also have the MS console and a Creators' Club subscription. This forum discussion seems to confirm that stock XBoxes cannot run such games, and this thread has more about the potential viewership of such work. This Slashdot sub-thread focuses on deployment realities, whilte this one focuses on the pricing model. The Microsoft staff blogs have additional posts on the subject. Adobe Flash Player doesn't run on Microsoft XBox, but then again, those games are bound to Microsoft environments, and the distribution model still seems very very constrained.... to become the "YouTube of games" it seems like you'd have to minimize distribution as well as production costs, and particularly to minimize viewing costs, right...?
Posted by JohnDowdell at August 14, 2006 02:41 PM
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Comments
I don't know if commenting on posts 1/2 a year late makes much sense, but the thing that has recently really got me interested in developing games for xbox is that this burger king game sold over 2 million copies! That's huge. Plus, the revenue shares that you can get (for xbox live 360 anyway) look to be the most competitive for any similar portal.
Posted by: Phillip Kerman at January 21, 2007 08:46 PM