While we still wait to hear details of Sony’s homebrew offerings of the PS3 (we know it runs on Linux, but no one knows how exactly yet), Microsoft announces what it is going to do.
Called XNA Game Studio Express, it will be a free program available to anyone who wishes to make games for the Xbox 360. On top of that, for a US$99 annual fee, you can join a “Creators Club,” and share your work with others.
XNA Game Studio Express will be allowed to make commercial Windows games, but only non-commercial X360 games.
However, there is a couple of catches. Some of them probably easy to overcome,
These requirements include that the intended recipient of the content must be logged in to Xbox Live and have an active subscription to the XNA Creators Club, must have downloaded the XNA Framework runtime environment for the Xbox 360, and must have XNA Game Studio Express installed on their own development PC.
The person who wants to play your game then needs to download the source code and then recompile it on their computers and transfer it over to their X360’s in order to play. You also cannot put it on a memory card and go over to a friends house with it.
Hopefully Sony will one-up them in that respect. As said, it comes with Linux and it is already known what libraries they are using in games. This may make Sony issue a statement soon.
The XNA FAQ is also available to read now.
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