A Revolution in Console Game Development

As game systems become more and more advanced, game development has become much more expensive - mainstream releases are multi-million dollar productions. If there is not a guaranteed market for a game, it will probably never see the light of day on a console because the costs are just too high and companies like to play it safe. That is a shame, because it means so many types of games will never get made or experienced by a wide group of players.

That has all changed with Microsoft's recent announcement during its keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2008. Microsoft announced that they are expanding their already revolutionary XNA development platform and allowing developers to submit games that can be downloaded and accessed by all XBOX Live users (ie..the YouTube of games). What this means is that any developer, whether a single person or a small team can create games for the XBOX 360 that can then be submitted to the new XNA Community section of XBOX Live, where users can download and rate games. Ultimately, games can also be sold through XBOX Live.

Why is this such a big deal? It means that someone with a really good game idea and the development skills can get their game in front of potentially millions of players on a console, something that has never been possible before. A single developer with the skills could create a game that can be played by millions of people.

The games have to go through an approval process to ensure that people are not just dumping crap online, but that is a good thing. The costs to do this are extremely reasonable too. The XNA development tools are free - being able to publish to XBOX costs $99 a year.

The tools take a lot of the difficulty out of development of high quality games by making it easy to incorporate networking, 3d graphics, voice chat, achievements, multiplayer, etc.. The developer doesn't need to focus on the infrastructure, but instead of the game itself. With the same tools, you can also easily target the PC platform, and in the next version, the Zune handheld as well.

The XBOX Live Community Games service will launch later this year, and will start a new era in console games. Already, the games that have offered as a preview of what people have made are incredible. User created content has transformed gaming in a lot of ways already - having user created games on the XBOX 360 will open up entirely new possibilities. I can't wait to try developping some ideas myself.

Shown below is gameplay from Jelly Car, one of the preview games available. This was a user created game - it looks simplistic at first, until you realize that it has a full physics engine in it. It's an example of some of the amazing work being done by small developers.