Pushed to the Edge #10: Homebrew, 360 Style
Aug 14, 2006
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.
In contrast, XNA could radically change gaming. That's not just hyperbole, even though a truly successful rollout would do little more than create the same sort of homebrew gaming landscape on the 360 that has long existed on the PC.
Think about that. Xbox Live has always had the potential to become a clearinghouse full of interesting games, and XNA only adds to the equation. Sure, there are hundreds of cool games scattered over the Internet, but there's no single portal to access them all in use by every PC owner. On the 360, content creators can be certain that their games will be set down in front of an audience, to sink or swim.
Compared to the increasingly negative press swirling around Sony and the PS3 (which might have its own Linux-based user development environment), Microsoft seems to be making a very sharp move. Opening the 360 to public development demonstrates tremendous confidence in the hardware and userbase.
 PlayStation 3  Xbox 360 |
The company has always positioned itself as a software giant, not a hardware innovator, and by putting the 360's game tools into the hands of the public, they're following up on that claim.
We've been waiting to see Sony make a similar move on the PSP for a long time, and in the wake of the nosediving attitiude towards Sony's handheld, this announcement resonates loud and clear. Microsoft is sending a very clear message with this release: the Xbox 360 is meant to be the console for absolutely everyone, including budding creators.
A key factor in the success or failure of XNA won't only be the games created through it, however. It will be the evolution and development of the tools themselves. Will users be able to code their own custom environments, and if so, could they be distributed as easily as games? That will be a must for the platform to become a thriving, useful development environment rather than a promising curiosity.
Meanwhile, some will be tempted to see this effort as a transparent recruiting ploy on Microsoft's part. The company has agreements with 10 universities to integrate XNA and the 360 into their coursework, which represents a fertile recruitment pool for the company. But for now I'll hold off on the pessimism. If a bunch of kids get jobs at Microsoft studios because of the XNA, good for them. In the meantime the swelling 360 userbase will potentially have far more games to play than otherwise would have been the case. I'll take diversity over total corporate control any day.
Pushed to the Edge is a regular commentary covering elements of the video game industry that cause elation, dismay, outrage, or some combination of the above.