Microsoft has its eye on creating a homebrew revolution it hopes will do for games what YouTube.com did for videos. The new XNA Game Studio Express for Windows XP SP2 is a game development kit based on Visual C# Express 2005 that will permit hobbyist developers to quickly get started building games. The beta will be released Aug. 30 and will be entirely free for Windows but requires a $99 annual Creators Club subscription if you want to release your games on the Xbox 360. Here's the catch: If you simply want to play these homebrew games on your 360, you'll need to pay for a subscription too, then download the source code and content assets, recompile the game on your PC and then deploy it to your console. OK, so not exactly plug and play, though it's an easy leap to imagine the cream of the crop will get an official release on Xbox Live Arcade. It's certainly a 180-degree turn from Sony, which keeps trying to close off these kinds of apps on the PSP...
Leave a comment