XNA Framework & Xbox 360 Details

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During his keynote presentation today at Gamefest 2006, a Microsoft(R) game developer event hosted by Microsoft in Seattle

I'm relaxing out here in Redmond and by my clock, it is 11 PM on Sunday night.

What gives?


As far as XNA itself, it's pretty much on par with what I suspected it would be (though I didn't have any insider knowledge on this one). I'm mainly curious about whether the $100 gets you access to a physical dev kit or what. Considering that's a quarter of retail price, I am kind of confused there. On the one hand, I can't imagine getting an actual dev kit that cheap. On the other hand, I'm not sure how you can test properly without one. A couple guys suggested that it might just give you publishing rights to XBLA, getting stuff up extremely fast (with a quick review cycle in between). That seems plausible, assuming XNA does its job well...although I'm still wondering how effectively you can leverage the 360 like that.
EDIT: Checked with a friend. No charcoal boxes involved.

I assume the real presentation tomorrow will clear things up. Either way, I'll sure be looking forward to August 30. Should be fun to migrate from the fledgling MDX 2.0 to the Real Deal.

[Edited by - Promit on August 14, 2006 1:53:28 AM]

That is... just strange. Being late afternoon in Australia I thought nothing of it. Maybe it was a press release released early... meant for tomorrows news.

Or it could be a dupe!

You take a left... you take a right... but there is no avoiding, The Scary Door.

Gamasutra has this to say about it.

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The games created with XNA Game Studio Express will not initially be available to regular Xbox 360 users, although there is hope that successful titles made with the package might go on to debut in enhanced form on the universal Xbox Live Arcade service, and a longer-term goal is to create a less restricted distribution market using Xbox Live.

Even so, it sounds interesting - i'll be curious to see how it unfolds.

It seems to have been an official press release, check out the details and pile of links over at Tom Miller's blog. Tom also posted a link to participate in the XNA Game Studio beta, so head over to his blog now!

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Shh.. We can't tell anyone this yet

[oh] [grin]

Aaah, so its finally gone public [grin]

Some of the DX MVP's were informed about the GameFest keynote last week and it's been hard not to say anything (although superpig hinted at it in his journal I think [wink]). One hell of an interesting development.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/ is the new XNA developer page, XNA Game Studio Express/XNA Framework Announced in particular.

I don't have time to check the public details right now, but if anyone has any questions about this then I or one of the other DX MVP's may be able to clarify things a bit. I've got a couple of pages of notes from the aforementioned LiveMeeting. Then again, seems theres quite a big XNA specific FAQ available...

Jack

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Q: What does XNA stand for? A: XNA’s Not Acronymed

[grin]

The thing that ruins it, which they didn't mention in the private LiveMeeting, is the $99/year subscription. That's to deploy to a 360, for development, debugging, or just playing. This limits your potential audience to anyone else who's willing to shell out $99/year. This will appeal to developers looking to make a demo to ship out to studios, which is certainly a giant step in the right direction. This won't appeal to the larger market, looking to just play indie games. These people could have put up with downloading some tools to play homebrew games, but having to pay a subscription to play homebrew games isn't likely going to be everyone's favourite idea.

Yeah, that subscription fee surprised me as well.

Although, as I hinted at in the meeting, I think the almost "open source" style distribution they were talking about was more prohibitive when it came to deploying. But Mitch Walker seemed to suggest they were working on changing/improving this in the future...

Jack

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Original post by Namethatnobodyelsetook The thing that ruins it, which they didn't mention in the private LiveMeeting, is the $99/year subscription. That's to deploy to a 360, for development, debugging, or just playing. This limits your potential audience to anyone else who's willing to shell out $99/year. This will appeal to developers looking to make a demo to ship out to studios, which is certainly a giant step in the right direction. This won't appeal to the larger market, looking to just play indie games. These people could have put up with downloading some tools to play homebrew games, but having to pay a subscription to play homebrew games isn't likely going to be everyone's favourite idea.

Actually, I like the fact that there's a subscription. You won't get just any ol' yahoo trying to make a game. It forces developers to hone their skills and come up with something viable and of quality. You practice on your PC (for free) and then you move up to the big-small time with XBLExpress. Makes sense in my opinion.

Another question. If you are paying $99 a year to develop for XBL, do you still have to pay $49 to be able to play your commercial games on XBL?

edit: fix credited to JJ.

[Edited by - Alpha_ProgDes on August 14, 2006 9:25:10 AM]

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes Actually, I like the fact that there's a subscription. You won't get just any ol' yahoo trying to make a game. It forces developers to hone their skills and come up with something viable and of quality.

And why does the end user need to pay $99/year to play your game? If the $99/year was for the development tools, and anyone could play for free, fine. If it was an additional benefit of Live! gold, now you can play homebrew, then great. As is, you can now develop on 360, but you'll have almost no potential audience.

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes Another question. If you are paying $99 a month to develop for XBL, do you still have to pay $49 to be able to play your commercial games on XBL?

The way that I interpret it is that $99 (per year, not per month - but I'll assume that was a typo [smile]) gets you a special type of account, an XNA Creators Club subscription. Provided you have an active subscription you can develop your own titles (and debug/deploy accordingly) and you can also play other peoples games created under the same subscription. If you're NOT a developer but want to play "home brew" titles you'll still need the full subscription.

hth
Jack

I wonder about the one Q in the FAQ that says there is no current way of sharing binaries. If you want another "creators club" member to play your game, you have to give him the source code/assets/and project so they can compile then enjoy your game.

Seems kinda ghetto to me ... I hope that's only a temporary thing. I mean, what if I want to share my game, but not my source code?

The potential workaround I've come up with is to compile and obfuscate your game's code into an assembly, then distribute an xnaexpress project which references your game dll and does something like

MyGame.Play();

:-D

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Original post by Namethatnobodyelsetook Quote: Original post by Alpha_ProgDes Actually, I like the fact that there's a subscription. You won't get just any ol' yahoo trying to make a game. It forces developers to hone their skills and come up with something viable and of quality. And why does the end user need to pay $99/year to play your game? If the $99/year was for the development tools, and anyone could play for free, fine. If it was an additional benefit of Live! gold, now you can play homebrew, then great. As is, you can now develop on 360, but you'll have almost no potential audience.

Hold up! I didn't think the end-user had to pay $99 to play XBL, Commercial, and/or Homebrew (a.k.a. XBLE) games. I thought they paid the regular $49 a year.

and JJ, what do you mean by full subscription? $49 a year right? or something else?

This should help to understand the "non developer solution" plans for XNA framework.

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The goal is that, in the future, they'll have a channel for people who are not members of the creator's club to download and play the homebrew games. Like, there's Live Aracade, and there will be Creator's Arcade or some such. Anyone in the creator's club would theoretically be able to submit to Creator's Arcade and MS would examine it to make sure it's not really a pirate game or won't harm your Xbox, then they put it up for everyone to download and check out. That aspect of it is a little further out (think next year) and they're still working on details like ownership and copyright, how they'll examine submissions for safety, etc.

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Original post by Demirug This should help to understand the "non developer solution" plans for XNA framework. Quote: The goal is that, in the future, they'll have a channel for people who are not members of the creator's club to download and play the homebrew games. Like, there's Live Aracade, and there will be Creator's Arcade or some such. Anyone in the creator's club would theoretically be able to submit to Creator's Arcade and MS would examine it to make sure it's not really a pirate game or won't harm your Xbox, then they put it up for everyone to download and check out. That aspect of it is a little further out (think next year) and they're still working on details like ownership and copyright, how they'll examine submissions for safety, etc.

Which is great, because it means they didn't hold up the release of XNA Studio Express to sort it out; gives us (hopefully) enough time to have something ready when they are :)

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Original post by joelmartinez I wonder about the one Q in the FAQ that says there is no current way of sharing binaries. If you want another "creators club" member to play your game, you have to give him the source code/assets/and project so they can compile then enjoy your game. Seems kinda ghetto to me ... I hope that's only a temporary thing. I mean, what if I want to share my game, but not my source code?

I asked pretty much the same question in our LiveMeeting. Seems that this is the way forwards for now (bare in mind that the beta is out end-of-month and RTM is, I think, Holiday '06 - so we're not "gold" just yet) but it will be an area they're looking to improve upon.

In all fairness, no one can start writing XNA games until 30th August and I'd be surprised if many (or any) decent, finished, titles are done inside of the next few months. By the time those titles are genuinely ready to seek a wider audience MS might well have rolled out a much better distribution method...

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and JJ, what do you mean by full subscription? $49 a year right? or something else?

I'm hoping I'm not getting confused here [oh] Whilst us MVP's might've gotten a head-start on the technical details we've found out about the pricing strategy at the same time as the rest of you. I don't have any additional insight.

From the XNA FAQ:

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Q: How much will XNA Game Studio Express/XNA Framework cost? A: The XNA Game Studio Express tools and runtime environment for Windows is completely free. To develop, debug and/or play games on the Xbox 360 you will be required to purchase a XNA “Creator’s Club” subscription on the Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Marketplace. The subscription is available in 2 options, $99 a year or $49 for 4 months.

Emphasis mine. I read that to assume that both developer and player needs to part with some cash. The amount depends on how long you want to subscribe...

Jack

This means that I should also be able to use GM Script with XNA when we get the C# port working, right?

Awesome++.

Microsoft have been bloody great to us over this past year or so.

I'm so glad that MS finally put out more inforamtion on what XNA is going to include. They started with the XNA build project a few months ago, but have been silent about what else XNA might include. Putting the .NET runtime on the Xbox360 should give us all a nice little sandbox to work within. I'll be interested to see how well the program is accepted after the initial beta period.

I'm a tad confused in the FAQ, where it states that it will be based around C#. Now I'm not entirely competent when it comes to C#, or will I have to adopt it? Thanks. As far as I'm concerened with the issue of the XNA Game Studio Express I'm quite excited about it.