Console Game Development for the Masses - Xbox 360
Imagine my surprise when I open this morning’s e-mail to find a note from Microsoft telling me that Chris Satchell, general manager of Microsoft’s Game Developer Group, yesterday announced that anyone with a Windows XP-based PC will be able to develop game content for the Xbox 360 in the not too distant future ("this holiday season").
The announcement was made at Gamefest 2006, a game developer event being hosted by Microsoft in Seattle, and involves the release of XNA Game Studio Express - a new set of tools based on the XNA Platform which Microsoft announced during the 2005 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
XNA Game Studio Express itself will be free, but there will be an annual $99 subscription fee to something called the “creators club”.
Apparently Microsoft has also lined up at least 10 universities to include XNA Game Studio Express in their future course offerings.
This could cause quite an explosion in Xbox 360 content next year, and appears to be Microsoft’s effort to open the proprietary Xbox 360 platform as a counter to Sony’s hints that its use of open (or at least collaborative) standards like OpenGL and COLLADA would leave the PS3 open to general development as well. Of course, the Xbox 360 is here now, and has a significant installed base (over 5 million units world wide), and the PS3 is but a mere promise for mid-November delivery, with an installed base of zero, at the moment.
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