Developing games for xbox 360?

[whisperstorm]

I read on digg (pointing to this story http://news.com.com/2061-10797_3-6052255.html ) about how microsoft is going to release a cheap (~$100) game development kit for Xbox360. I wonder if this is something of interest to folks here? What do you think about converting your indie game to run on the 360?


From the article:

But at the Game Developers Conference here on Tuesday, the rumor is that Microsoft plans on announcing Wednesday a developers kit that would make it possible for anyone to build games for the console, or for PCs, and that the kit will cost only about $100.

[Sharpfish]

from the article:

But at the Game Developers Conference here on Tuesday, the rumor is that Microsoft plans on announcing Wednesday a developers kit that would make it possible for anyone to build games for the console, or for PCs, and that the kit will cost only about $100.

Sounds good if true. However I wonder what the licencing is like on that. They would probably still only allow official games through to be sold I would imagine, leaving the rest as freeware/homebrew.

either way I'm always interested in porting to consoles (not for sales but just for the experience and fun of it). A cheapDS kit would really liven up my "working" week :)

edit: I notice it says "for PC" also. What kind of game dev kit would MS release for PC? And I am intrigued by it's system requirements and how low they go.

[PoV]

I hope it's real and some tangible product, like a disc you drop in to your 360 to turn it in to a remote testing slave. But I'm thinking this is just some guy who mistook the XNA disc (http://www.microsoft.com/xna/) as some sort of xbox dev kit.

[HairyTroll]

Microsoft plans on announcing Wednesday a developers kit that would make it possible for anyone to build games for the console, or for PCs, and that the kit will cost only about $100.

I'm guessing that it will be a plugin for Visual Studio.

-Luke

[Hiro_Antagonist]

I'm guessing that it will be a plugin for Visual Studio.

Or rather, XNA, which itself is a Visual Studio wrapper for 'next-gen' PC/Xbox 360 development...

-Hiro_Antagonist

[Sharpfish]

The ability to use XNA is not in itself a licence to release games on a console. And of course the problem with XNA (if the Vista spec is to be trusted) is that it will support DX9 (fallback) and DX10 but not older?. Using XNA for indies on PC may be futile for a few years yet if it means minimum hardware requirements are raised. Also i'm not sure but it probably falls under "managed" code which means extra runtimes. Kinda goes against the usual indie game rules of keeping old technology happy.

XNA studio is rumoured to be a version of vs2005+sdks so it may well be an add on for vs.

Of course for X360 that wouldn't be a problem, but then there is the actual getting the games up for sale on that system which is still the barrier to entry for most smaller scale indies as far as I understand.

[PoV]

XNA studio is rumoured to be a version of vs2005+sdks so it may well be an add on for vs.
More than a rumor if you dig through the brand new propaganda slideshows and videos. Some fancy new version of Visual Studio with added functionality for project/content management, plus some game content friendly build tools. And a whole bunch of things that don't exist that you can recommend to them. Fun.

[luggage]

And they've released the source code for Mech Commander something or another too I think.

[Raptisoft]

I have to say the console situation has bummed me out a lot.

I would like to see the consoles work just like PC... as in, we don't have to go through publishers, etc-- we can just have download-and-buy.

[Polycount Productions]

Not sure how off-topic this is, but there was some posts about xbox development at makeitbigingames.com blog:

http://makeitbigingames.com/blog/?cat=2
(scroll down...)

[z3lda]

Don't forget about Sony:

http://us.playstation.com/beyond/welcome.html

[Hiro_Antagonist]

I have to say the console situation has bummed me out a lot.

I would like to see the consoles work just like PC... as in, we don't have to go through publishers, etc-- we can just have download-and-buy.
In theory this sounds good.

In practice, this is what caused the video game crash of the Atari generation. Seriously. There was a flood of cheap and poor games to the market. Nobody gave even a baseline quality assurance, and customers became disgruntled. There was no mechanism to tell acceptable titles from crap, prices plummeted from cheap and ultra-low-quality competition, and the money stopped flowing to the right people to keep the industry functioning. There was a glut in the market for a few years until the NES hit. I did some research on this whole thing a while back. It's a pretty interesting story, really.

Then Tengen tried to circumvent Nintendo's Quality Assurance program by making those funky black cartridges for the NES, before a judge slapped that practice down (and in doing so, saved what little baseline of quality we have in console titles today.)

It's my understanding that XLA titles have a streamlined certification process, cheaper than full retails titles, but it's still there. While the idea of having downloadable titles with no certification is appealing to me as a developer, as a customer it would simply turn me off to the whole thing. I wouldn't be able to tell the games that would actually work from the games that have poor stability, no standards adherance, or don't meet even baseline quality. Sure, *you* might think your game is high enough quality, but what about CrappySoftware Ltd or FlyByNight Inc.?

And while it's tempting to infer that certification systems don't exist at all on PC, they do in some forms in some limited environments -- and it's no accident that those are the environments that ship online/downloadable titles in higher quantity than anywhere else. This is what the major 'trustworthy' portals are. (RealArcade, Yahoo Games, MSN Gaming Zone, etc.)

Certification processes exist for a reason and serve us all. And unfortunately, I really do believe they're a necessary evil. I think the only way around it is to either a) have an open system that only caters to hard-core niche users willing to tolerate a bunch of hassle to buy/play low-budget indie titles (this is the situation on PC now), or b) come up with some sort of mechanism which reaches the same ends through cheaper means. Maybe some sort of community peer review system? Yet even that seems too geeky for the masses, who are willing to pay for the benefits of certification systems with higher prices and a lack of indie titles...

-Hiro_Antagonist

[tolik]

XNA CTP is available for download at Microsoft together with slides, videos and Mech project suitable for XNA completely with work-flow descriptions etc. No more rumours.

I guess everyone forgot what Sony previously did:
1) Yaro(u)ze
2) Linux kit for PS2
3) Promises Linux on PS3 by default

Did it open any new frontiers for indies so far?

Some new GDC stuff:
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/03/22/gdc-a-quick-chat-with-xblas-greg-canessa/
Yesterday's GDC interview with Greg revealed following:
"They'll continue to manage the service and hand pick the available games."

[chanon]

The difference of the current situation from the Atari situation is that back in those days there weren't any free demos of the games to try before buying. With the console + downloadable+unlockable demo model, the customer isn't risking their money (only their time) when trying out a game.

I think it would make sense to put a certain minimum level of quality control, like just to filter out the obvious crap and then let the market decide.

[Sakura Games]

In theory this sounds good.

In practice, this is what caused the video game crash of the Atari generation. Seriously. There was a flood of cheap and poor games to the market. Nobody gave even a baseline quality assurance, and customers became disgruntled.
I think would be enough to put an entry fee of like $100/year per each game. That works well, since those with crap games can't even think to spend this amount. Easy :cool:

[Hiro_Antagonist]

I think would be enough to put an entry fee of like $100/year per each game. That works well, since those with crap games can't even think to spend this amount. Easy :cool:
Heh. I think you and I draw the line at 'crap games' in very different places, then. =)