XNA lead Satchell tells us how Xbox Live Community Games will foster independent development
XNA boss Chris Satchell has said that he believes the ability to distribute XNA games to any of the ten million Xbox Live subscribers will drive more people into game creation.
In an exclusive interview with develop-online.net, the first part of which is published today, Satchell admitted that many people had initially shown interest in the XNA framework but had been put off due to the inability to share Xbox 360 binaries with anyone other than fellow paid Creators Club subscribers.
"I definitely think that [Xbox Live Community Games] will drive more people to XNA. A lot of people want to show others what they've done, and that's what we hear a lot."
Indeed, one of the core beliefs behind the XNA initiative is that by enabling a community to be creative you're engaging them in development, and this will bring more people into the industry.
"I really worry about the university system and the decline of computer science students," he says. "I mean, these are people we need to hire for our industry. But when you think about what you learn on the Xbox 360 - maths, physics, computer science techniques like parallel processing – it's really setting people up for success and helping our industry too."
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For more from Satchell - including more in-depth details of the game submission process, the effect that Community Games will have on Xbox Live Arcade developers and what the Community Games mean to regular gamers - check out the first part of our interview here.
Why the hell would I care about this? He says it's going to make us gamers have loads of choice - what, of diffrent PacMan clones??
These XNA games will look rubbish compared to the Arcade games!
The Community Games are supposed to be peer-reviewed, so endless pac-man clones should be filtered out.
Have you played the newly released Community Game demos? They approach the visual and gameplay quality of most Live Arcade games, and in my opinion are better than the retro games available to buy. There are lots of good XNA games out there that most people haven't heard of, including the Dream Build Play entries from last year.
"The Community Games are supposed to be peer-reviewed, so endless pac-man clones should be filtered out."
That's not true. The review process has strict guidelines, the review is for checking the game doesn't crash, doesn't contain adult or dubious art/text and meets certain usability requirements. Adv - joe idiot cannot reject your game because he doesn't like it. Disadv - yes, people could make a million pac man clones if they wanted. Filtering out crap clones is the job of the rating system so it shouldn't be a problem, just go for the ones with 5 stars.
You haven't had a lot of exposure to community based development if you can't see the potential in this. There are lots of great examples, but most recently, take a look at what happened when the developers of Halo put a map editor in their latest game. The community has created some really amazing things; everything from simple variants to incredibly complex games that they made by bending the rules in ways developers never thought were possible.
Sure, this is more complicated than a map editor, yet nonetheless its a tool and a platform for beginners. Using Xbox Live exposes the creativity of so many people previously unseen.
Saying that this is irrelevant because there's a lot of PacMan clones is like saying we should just stop making games because there's a whole bunch of "World War II-themed shooters" out there.
