GDC 08: Community Games Coming to Xbox Live

February 20, 2008 11:10 AM

During the Microsoft keynote Game Developers Conference today, chief XNA architect Chris Satchell announced "Xbox Live Community Games," a new project that will allow independent developers to freely distribute their games on Xbox Live.

The service will be "democratized," allowing gamers to create a game, submit it for distribution, rate the titles, and review them.

Developers will be given "creator identities" which function similar to GamerTags, tracking which games they have created. If a submitted game is reviewed well--with other creators applying judgment on subjects such as "violent content" using simple sliders--it will then be allowed for full download on Xbox Live.

Demos of the first games developed under the project are already available on Xbox Live.

Chris Faylor and Nick Breckon

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GDC 08

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manlyman

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February 20, 2008 11:20 AM

This is exactly what consoles need. I am very excited to see the "YouTube" of games. With how great Live already is I can only imagine how good this system will be.
- mancide
  
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  February 20, 2008 11:25 AM
  
  Hopefully the games will be inexpensive and we will see some really great games come from this.
  - SockMonkeh
    
     reply
    February 20, 2008 11:28 AM
    
    I'm imaging the games will be free to download, but it's also possible they will cost a small fee.
    - mittense
      
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      February 20, 2008 11:41 AM
      
      This can only mean good thing for indie developers. Which is good, because that's what I thought XNA was always about to begin with; once I actually started attempting to distribute alpha copies of my games to friends, though, I found that for the most part it was a very painful process. The amount of people that could get my game working (and I spent a solid week or two ensuring it wasn't my code at fault) without the XNA Game Studio installed were in the minority. Distribution of XNA titles to PC users basically requires an installer, and that's annoying, at best.
      - SockMonkeh
        
         reply
        February 20, 2008 2:17 PM
        
        Yeah, I started leaning XNA and I was hyped to be developing cute little indie games in the future, but once I realized it would be next to impossible to actually get people playing my games I lost interest. Now I'll have to get back into it.