Xbox Community Games Arrive at New Xbox Experience Launch

October 17, 2008 12:04 PM

The Xbox Community Games feature, the long-awaited system allowing amateur developers to create games for the Xbox 360, will come online with its own Channel when the New Xbox Experience launches on November 19.

A video interview with Kathleen Sanders from the XNA team on Major Nelson reveals the process by which aspiring developers can design and submit their own games to Xbox Live. Xbox Live subscribers can download games from the Community Games Channel, though none of them will be free.

XNA contest winners The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, left, and Blazing Birds

"It's crazy, the range of games [I've seen] ... you've got Pong clones, you've got RTSs ... it continually surprises me," Sanders said of the games made so far.

"Unlike Xbox Live Arcade games, when a creator creates a game, from the time that they submit it for peer review, to the time it appears on Xbox Live, is 48 hours," commented Sanders.

XNA is a development environment for programmers to create games for Windows and Xbox 360 and Microsoft has incentivized XNA game development in the past with Xbox Live Arcade contracts. Now, creators themselves will be able to sell games and collect 70% royalties for their work.

Blake Ellison

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jtthe2nd

 reply
October 17, 2008 12:22 PM

What is with MS's insistence that NOTHING going through XBL be free? XBL users already pay a damn fee for the service. If a developer wants to offer something free why the hell not? Is it a principle thing or a bandwidth thing?
- dmiller
  
   reply
  October 17, 2008 1:52 PM
  
  Actually, users are paying to play online. Besides that, XBL is free.
- thecray
  
   reply
  October 17, 2008 2:45 PM
  
  I can't comment on the rest of xbox live, but community games have a price attached to them as a sort of incentive to make your game at least somewhat professional quality, since if your game isn't good, then nobody will end up playing it.
  
  If it was free, then everybody and their uncle would just upload some lame piece of crap, and the community games would then be filled with shit.
  - Chandler55
    
     reply
    October 19, 2008 12:20 PM
    
    yeah but the community voting thing takes care of that, I can still put up crap for $4.99 if I wanted to, in fact the people who would upload crap would charge money because they're the type of people who don't care about games and just want to make money
- Vampyre_Dark
  
   reply
  October 18, 2008 8:01 AM
  
  Hey that's great. Thanks for deciding that when I publish my game through here next year, that it has to be free, because you already pay Microsoft money.
- monchipeters
  
   reply
  October 19, 2008 11:52 PM
  
  I think it makes sense and is a great way for both M$ and the creator to make some profit.
  Developing a game is something worth being acknowledged and rewarded for and if M$ takes a 30% slice to compensate for using XBL as a medium to promote it and sell your game, then why not?