Pushed to the Edge #10: Homebrew, 360 Style

After weeks of speculation about the shape of the industry in a post-E3 landscape, it was about time for some truly good news. (The E3 cancellation might be good news, but we can't be sure yet.) Monday morning saw tremendous news, indeed: this autumn Microsoft will release XNA Game Studio Express, a free beta suite of game development tools meant to open the Xbox 360 platform to the public. This winter, for an annual $99 subscription fee, enterprising developers will receive access to additional tools and the option to share, test, and play their XNA content on the Xbox 360.

The initial free XNA download will be available on August 30 and require only a Windows XP PC. The tools will create games for both XP and the 360, hopefully allowing the same content to run on both systems. With respect to the $99/year "creators club," no distribution mechanism is specified, though Xbox Live is the obvious choice for 360 content.

If that were the case, there is no word yet of pricing (obviously, user-developed games should be free, if not priced by developers) or of how ownership rights will be handled. If YouTube and MySpace provide any precedent, developers might expect their efforts to become property of Microsoft.

Microsoft XNA Net Yaroze

Even with that caveat, this could become the best thing to happen to consoles since polygons. Microsoft has the security tools in place to prevent the 360 from becoming a pirate cove (unlike the PSP) and has several partners onboard already to provide extra game engine and modeling tools. Imagine peeking into Xbox Live and finding not only professionally developed games and ported classics, but raw, weird, and potentially innovative user creations. The law of averages says that most of the content will be awful, but why let that ruin things for the gems that will inevitably arise?

This isn't the first time a console manufacturer has released a public dev kit. In 1997 Sony dropped the Net Yaroze, an expensive ($750) limited release that allowed development for the original PlayStation. The software platform could be used on a PC or Mac, and a special (black!) PSOne console was supplied to run the code.

The Yaroze wasn't an ideal platform, however. It couldn't burn media, forcing developers to rely only on onboard memory to store games. The Internet was nascent, making distribution also limited. And even if code could be distributed, it was playable only on another compatible region-free console. Those factors limited Sony's release to the range of formal experimentation and little else. The Yaroze is only a footnote.