Xbox Community Games Arrive at New Xbox Experience Launch
A video interview with Kathleen Sanders from the XNA team on Major Nelson reveals the process by which aspiring developers can design and submit their own games to Xbox Live. Xbox Live subscribers can download games from the Community Games Channel, though none of them will be free.
"It's crazy, the range of games [I've seen] ... you've got Pong clones, you've got RTSs ... it continually surprises me," Sanders said of the games made so far.
"Unlike Xbox Live Arcade games, when a creator creates a game, from the time that they submit it for peer review, to the time it appears on Xbox Live, is 48 hours," commented Sanders.
XNA is a development environment for programmers to create games for Windows and Xbox 360 and Microsoft has incentivized XNA game development in the past with Xbox Live Arcade contracts. Now, creators themselves will be able to sell games and collect 70% royalties for their work.
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What is with MS's insistence that NOTHING going through XBL be free? XBL users already pay a damn fee for the service. If a developer wants to offer something free why the hell not? Is it a principle thing or a bandwidth thing?
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I can't comment on the rest of xbox live, but community games have a price attached to them as a sort of incentive to make your game at least somewhat professional quality, since if your game isn't good, then nobody will end up playing it.
If it was free, then everybody and their uncle would just upload some lame piece of crap, and the community games would then be filled with shit.