Well, another conference has come and we have more announcements it seems. Hard to believe I’ve neglected this blog for so long that it’s been since last August that I wrote anything. This is probably because we have so many other team members who are doing such a great job with their own blogs, mine almost seems redundant!
Nevertheless, some great things annouced today that are quite exciting. You can read all about them on the XNA Team Blog as well.
The first big announcement was Xbox LIVE community games coming this holiday season (with a special preview for a limited time right now). Later this year you will be able to develop your own games using the XNA Creators Club subscription and upload your game to Xbox LIVE for the whole world to see and play for free (assuming it passes a peer review). What’s more, if you believe your game is a money maker, you will actually be able to sell your game and make money. Exciting times are coming indeed.
As part of this, there are seven community games available fore a very limited time right now. If you want to try them out (and I heartily recommend you do), first go to the market place on your Xbox and go to the Game Store and navigate down to XNA Creators Club and download the new Game Launcher. Once it’s downloaded, navigate back to the Games Library on the games tab, and under “My Games” navigate over to the “XNA Creators Club” twist and press Y to see the list of games to download. They’ll appear under that twist to play once they’re downloaded as well.
While this was a huge announcement in and of itself, we actually made a second announcement today as well. Starting with XNA Game Studio 3.0 you will not only be able to create games for Xbox and Windows, but you’ll also be able to create them for your Zune as well. You’ll even be able to use the wireless capability of the Zune to play against other nearby Zune’s in multiplayer games!
As I’ve sometimes implied with my reflection posts and the like, annoucements like we made today are the reason I do what I do. It’s been my stated goal for years now to bring managed code and gaming to the masses and we’re getting there, one game at a time.