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Gamefest, Microsoft’s yearly show for game developers, kicks off today. The event should prove particularly exciting to many more than the hardcore professional development clique, as Microsoft is announcing a new community based game development initiative, dubbed the XNA Game Studio Express.The Studio Express software is based upon the XNA tools Microsoft provides to professional developers, yet lowers the expertise-barrier to entry so as to allow for a much broader range of programmers to develop games for the 360.
Microsoft intends to offer the completed version of XNA Game Studio Express by the end of the year as a $99 a year subscription service. Subscribers will have access to the software package as well as a community of other junior-developers. Subscribers will be able to offer up their work for others to download, but only other subscribers will be able to play it. Microsoft has hopes of developing a large-scale system down the road that will allow amateur-developers to offer up their creations for purchase via Xbox Live Arcade, and later a veritable YouTube-style community-judged submission system.
Dev-kits for recent consoles have been prohibitively expensive for all but the most committed amateur developer. PS2 dev-kits cost $20,000 at launch, and full dev-kits for the older PSOne were $4,000. Nintendo broke the trend recently by reportedly selling Wii dev-kits for only $2,000. Perhaps in fear of Nintendo snapping up the mass of pent-up creativity and innovation that exists among independent and enthusiastic amateur developers, Microsoft’s value-leading initiative will be the most accessible console development program in history.
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