Free development software for the Xbox 360. With a catch. XNA Game Studio Express, a PC hosted game development environment for the XBOX 360, has been released. XNA Game Studio Express is based on Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and the .NET Compact Framework. It runs on any Windows XP PC, and allows the development of games for both Windows and the XBox 360. There is a catch or two. You can offer your new games trhu the Xbox Live Arcade, you will have to pay Microsoft $99 per year through XBox Live Marketplace to become an "XNA Creators Club" member. This also gets you access to white papers, sample code, and support forum - so its a pretty good deal. Any games offered thru Xbox Live Arcade are only available to other XNA Creators Club members, who also have the Xbox 360 hard drive (and have paid Microsoft $99/year) Oh yeah - any game you offer includes the source code, must be offered on non-commercial terms, and is re-compiled on the other end. Basically this pretty much rules out shareware or commercial XBox 360 games. You cannot distribute the games on memory cards or CD/DVD's "at this time". Frankly, this is an interesting idea; the biggest mistake here that Microsoft is making is not allowing the burning of XBox 360 compatible CD/DVD's, which would allow for a shareware market to develop. |
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