Create Your Own Xbox 360 Games

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

That’s right, create your own Xbox 360 console games with XNA Game Studio Express from Microsoft, and for only $99 you can build, test and share your games and have many resources to help speedup the development process.

In the 30 years of video game development, the art of making console games has been reserved for those with big projects, big budgets and the backing of big game labels. Now Microsoft Corp. is bringing this art to the masses with a revolutionary new set of tools, called XNA Game Studio Express, based on the XNA platform. XNA Game Studio Express will democratize game development by delivering the necessary tools to hobbyists, students, indie developers and studios alike to help them bring their creative game ideas to life while nurturing game development talent, collaboration and sharing that will benefit the entire industry.

During his keynote presentation today at Gamefest 2006, a Microsoft game developer event hosted by Microsoft in Seattle, Chris Satchell, general manager of the Game Developer Group at Microsoft, announced details of the new technology, which will be broadly available this holiday season. XNA Game Studio Express will be available for free to anyone with a Windows XP-based PC and will provide them with Microsoft’s next-generation platform for game development. By joining a “creators club” for an annual subscription fee of $99 (U.S.), users will be able to build, test and share their games on Xbox 360 and access a wealth of materials to help speed the game development progress. This represents the first significant opportunity for novice developers to make a console game without a significant investment in resources. Source: Microsoft

We Say: Where was this stuff when I was in school, talk about what could’ve been a career changer, and with more than 10 universities to add XNA Game Studio Express and Xbox 360 game development into their curricula, this could help do that for some of today’s youth.

Added: Gizmodo says, “Initially, these homebrew (is it still considered “homebrew” if you’re using official tools?) games will only be playable to other coders part of a so-called “Creator’s Club,” a nice way to say that Microsoft will charge you $99 for a one-year subscription to play such games.”