As the resident Xbox LIVE Arcade whore (60+ games and counting!), the prospect of community-developed games is easily my favorite New Xbox Experience pack-in.
Sure, you could argue that there's probably going to be a bunch of utterly stupid titles showing up on the Community Games Channel, but even if for every ten Jelly Cars there's only one Dishwasher, I'd still consider the service to be a success.
Do we have any indie developers in our midst? Care to tell us if you're planning to join in on this initiative?
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:c3d65b0c-273b-4548-8e36-3fa9e56f93b5&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" mce_href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:c3d65b0c-273b-4548-8e36-3fa9e56f93b5&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Xbox LIVE Community Games">Video: Xbox LIVE Community Games</a>
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So along with the Xbox Live charge, how much more are they going to charge for this?
If it's free, it will be free for a couple of months, then they will come out and say, "In order to expand your gaming experience, we are adding in a small charge of 99 cents to community made games to account for server costs and speeding up the download speed." Then a couple of months later it will go up and up until only 5 games are released a month, after certified by Microsoft, and they will charge 10 bucks each. Sad to say that this sounds very likely.
so basically its gonna be like the retro days when people would code for hours to make games for the Atari and so on only that its more infomercial and there's gonna be a load of games that are (sorry for being bias) random or crap but the only judges are the public which i would imagine there would be some fee to take part.
in a way its good and in a way its crap reason being...
1. you would have to pay for xbox live in the first place so that's £40
2. You would pay to be part of the community and for the tools need (I'm guessing for for not looking)
3. People like me paying to go to university makes you feel a bit down in a way beacause there's a option you can just sit on your ass with some mates and just create a game and hope thats its a sucess with the thought of gettin some money for it.... then the people on the other hand (causal gamers) will buy it..
I'll give it time befor I can make full judgment but that's my thoughts on it...
and how long do you think before PS3 "Home" and the Wii will follow the bandwagon not that they will but its just rivalry
A Friend from another uni was telling me that his class had just started using XNA he'll be gutted when I tell him about this XD
rant over...
Yes, I've been interested in this for over a year, but the farthest I got was a 3D object rotation & 360 controller demo.
I too am somewhat concerned about the cost, (buying third-party & off-the-shelf tools like animation, physics, can be a bit pricey too) and this has hindered my progress more than a bit. The creators club isn't the cost of a Ferrari, but it isn't free (AFAIK) either.. At least it is less expensive than buying a dev kit (which can be up to the price of a new or used car) for any console in the past.
I encourage anyone that wants to seriously make a game-for-profit to go ahead and for this as it is the cutting edge right now.
Though, for me, I think I will stick with 2-D (only a little 3-D) as it is more interesting to me than fully 3-D.
Well make a GOOD game then maybe I will praise it :D i didn't say I absolute terrible, I just don't wanna see a game that had no heart and soul put into it...
@JiR INC Sounds to me they are following suit in criticisms already made about Live! From people such as Epic and Media Molecule. So to say PS3 or Wii is going to follow suit is crap. In fact if I'm not mistaken even Wii has a creation system for old school games. Not to mention it appears to have limits so I'm skeptical. Technically its not that open either it appears to have data size limits.
Also it looks to me as if its just another way to get extra money from people who want to play around. With the lure of maybe you can make money. Beyond that though it doesn't look half bad as MS first step into user content.
Just to reiterate my point you can make mods for UT3 for PS3 for FREE. With a full tools set for FREE. These are basically kids toys for those left out.
Ahhh Kathleen Sanders...look what you've become... the XNA Community Usurper...Who would've though it would come to this haha I'm impressed though, she worked her way up from the 'assist' for the 1up show spouting out 'like you know' at least 70 times a sentence to a Microsoft community manager saying it a mere...what 3 times during that video? So glad to see you well :)
@Volomon: modding can only take you so far. Sure you can make some really killer Total Conversions, but mods are still pretty limited- How many independent developers deal exclusively in modified content for one game?
This article raises a question for me, are community games available to Silver subscribers? It sounds like it's going to be available to all Live subscriptions, although they'll probably keep the peer review closed to those that subscribe to the the XNA creators club(a $99/year charge).
It looks promising for independent developers that don't have the high budgets required to have a game released on a big-name console. I don't see why people are having a problem with giving 70% of the money used to buy a game directly to the person(s) that made them.
Longtime lurker here, and hell yes, I'm looking forward to it. I've heard many nightmare stories about Microsoft's XBLA strictures, so opening it up is a good thing. There's a chance that a glut of dross will threaten to bury anything good, but quality will out ultimately. Bring it on!
Community games can be sold for 200, 400, or 800 pts.
Other than that, there won't be any additional costs to buy, because MS is getting $100 a year from these devs plus between 10-40% of the revenue from every sale.
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Contest:
10:18 PM on 10.17.2008 | 
If it's free, it will be free for a couple of months, then they will come out and say, "In order to expand your gaming experience, we are adding in a small charge of 99 cents to community made games to account for server costs and speeding up the download speed." Then a couple of months later it will go up and up until only 5 games are released a month, after certified by Microsoft, and they will charge 10 bucks each. Sad to say that this sounds very likely.
in a way its good and in a way its crap reason being...
1. you would have to pay for xbox live in the first place so that's £40
2. You would pay to be part of the community and for the tools need (I'm guessing for for not looking)
3. People like me paying to go to university makes you feel a bit down in a way beacause there's a option you can just sit on your ass with some mates and just create a game and hope thats its a sucess with the thought of gettin some money for it.... then the people on the other hand (causal gamers) will buy it..
I'll give it time befor I can make full judgment but that's my thoughts on it...
and how long do you think before PS3 "Home" and the Wii will follow the bandwagon not that they will but its just rivalry
A Friend from another uni was telling me that his class had just started using XNA he'll be gutted when I tell him about this XD
rant over...
I too am somewhat concerned about the cost, (buying third-party & off-the-shelf tools like animation, physics, can be a bit pricey too) and this has hindered my progress more than a bit. The creators club isn't the cost of a Ferrari, but it isn't free (AFAIK) either.. At least it is less expensive than buying a dev kit (which can be up to the price of a new or used car) for any console in the past.
I encourage anyone that wants to seriously make a game-for-profit to go ahead and for this as it is the cutting edge right now.
Though, for me, I think I will stick with 2-D (only a little 3-D) as it is more interesting to me than fully 3-D.
Also it looks to me as if its just another way to get extra money from people who want to play around. With the lure of maybe you can make money. Beyond that though it doesn't look half bad as MS first step into user content.
This article raises a question for me, are community games available to Silver subscribers? It sounds like it's going to be available to all Live subscriptions, although they'll probably keep the peer review closed to those that subscribe to the the XNA creators club(a $99/year charge).
It looks promising for independent developers that don't have the high budgets required to have a game released on a big-name console. I don't see why people are having a problem with giving 70% of the money used to buy a game directly to the person(s) that made them.
About community games: Awesome.
@Jack
Negative nancy.
Other than that, there won't be any additional costs to buy, because MS is getting $100 a year from these devs plus between 10-40% of the revenue from every sale.
src:
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/XboxLIVECommunityGames