Gotta Give Them Their Propers
So GDC is the big thing going on these days in Super Video Game World. Lots of announcements to and fro. The coolest one so far as I’m concerned is the new XNA interface for the 360. Announcement here. (But as always, ignore any “comments” because the a key sign of low intelligence is commenting on Kotaku/YouTube/etc.) More detailed FAQ here.
Short story is: all that homebrew XNA development that has presumably going on is actually going to be visible at some point. Right now, to play an XNA developed homebrew game (unless anything has changed since I last checked) on your 360 you had to pay to sign up to the “Creator’s Club”. It seems in the future that only the creators themselves will be signing up for the club (presumably at the same or a similar modest fee) to put the game onto the box. Then you can submit your game to an online “peer review” process. Supposedly this process is merely looking to vet games for a) basic quality control, b) naughty content, and c) plagiarism. If you get through this process, your game goes up for everyone to play. Most surprisingly, this will apparently allow people to sell their games this way just like other XBLA games.
This will probably hinge a lot on how frequent people can finish games (if you could get at least 1 game a week to go up alongside XBLA it will be a more than vibrant system) and how good the peer review is. Presumably they’ll take obvious steps of anonymising both ends of the process as best they can, and hopefully provide incentives to ensure fair and honest review somehow, but I think it won’t really be a problem either way until/unless the system is big and successful enough that it will be a pretty cool problem to have.
I’ve worked with XNA before and it really is pretty amazingly slick in many ways. Very easy to use and get working. The FAQ mentions that creators will retain the IP rights, but that could be read cynically as the game content rather than the actual source code and related data. In any case, coding a game in XNA kind of pretty much locks you in to Windows and the 360 anyway so nobody would really be blindsided by more restrictive terms. All in all, I think this is a pretty fantastic little bit of news.