Video: XNA Creators Club Beta Goes Live
I know I'm not the only person in the community that has a love affair with game development. Over the last year or so, Microsoft has been running with the XNA Game Studio, a tool-set that allows hobbiests to produce games for windows PCs, Zune and Xbox 360 using C#. While functionally limited, this provides developers a sandboxed, secure open platform to create games and share it with other developers in the community.
The major flaw with this platform was it was a subscription based runtime for the 360. The target audience for would-be developers was limited to others with developer accounts. Microsoft later announced that they would be creating the Creators Club, the "YouTube" of homebrew game development. A novel idea, and one that has gone live today!
This platform allows users to create games, peer review and submit titles to the Xbox community to a much wider audience. Not only does this open the door to the non-developer community, it also allows developers to get critical review information from developers. Peer reviews are limited to users with a premium account (so, Johnny Q Public cannot review your game), where regular members will only be able to download content that has already worked it's way through the pipeline.
I personally love this concept, and I wish that Sony and Nintendo would follow suit.
Community Games on Xbox Live beta now live [Major Nelson]
Asterick
Posted to Video Games on 20 May 2008
Other stuff like this: c#, community software, creators club, homebrew, microsoft, peer review, xna
