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[Xbox-Scene]

Community Games on Xbox Live beta now live Posted by XanTium | May 20 17:55 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From the XNA Team Blog: Today, we delivered on the promise we made at GDC to democratize game development with the launch of the newly designed XNA Creators Club Online Web site and the highly anticipated beta of Community Games on Xbox LIVE. When we announced this new service at GDC 2008, it was met with great excitement around the world. Now we're pleased to offer you an opportunity to interact with this new site and test out the distribution pipeline to Xbox LIVE!  If you're a already a  premium member, you will be able to join us in the Community Games on Xbox LIVE Beta immediately, where you can submit your games and review others games, and enjoy playing  them on Xbox LIVE! If you are not a member, sign up today and get involved in making game development history. We're extremely excited about what we have to offer - this effort represents, quite literally, several developer-years of work, and we're proud to show it off! Here are a few cool things we encourage you to check out: 1)      The Quick Start Guide will take you on a tour of all the features of the new site plus a guided tour of how the community games distribution pipeline works. 2)      The new Education Content Catalog lets you find content quickly by type or development area 3)      The new Role Playing Game Starter Kit - sure to stimulate your need for creating your own "old school" RPG-style game 4)      The new Community Spotlight area, featuring interviews and articles from amazing community contributors (and sometimes a "celebrity interview") We encourage you, no matter what your game development expertise, to visit the new XNA Creators Club Online Web site, at http://creators.xna.com, to see the new changes for yourself! For premium members, we strongly encourage you to submit and review games of all types during the Beta. Our goal is to give the community the ability to fully test the functionality of these new features so that we can give you the best experience possible at the time of our final release. P.S. - Don't forget to read the welcome note from our Community Team leader, Dave Mitchell!

[UHYVE]

Okay, there's always been one thing that has confused me about this whole XNA thing. At some point, will these games be released on Xbox Live Arcade? I mean, it'll probably look good on your resume to have your game be one of the top games on "Xbox Live Community Games", but... and I don't know if I'm speaking for everyone here... money is nice.

[AzBat]

QUOTE(UHYVE @ May 20 2008, 08:43 PM)

Okay, there's always been one thing that has confused me about this whole XNA thing. At some point, will these games be released on Xbox Live Arcade? I mean, it'll probably look good on your resume to have your game be one of the top games on "Xbox Live Community Games", but... and I don't know if I'm speaking for everyone here... money is nice.

Community Games are available to the general public. There's no need for them to be made available on Live Arcade. Now granted they won't support achievements and a few other things Arcade games do. They have said they haven't decided the business model for Community games, but there will be one. Initially all the games posted on the beta will be free, but they have said that they will probably offer a method for developers to charge for games if they want. How they will get that money is up for debate, but most believe that you'll get some kind of account to cash in the MS points. BTW, the most popular and interesting of the games that will come out might get noticed and eventually picked up by a publisher for placement on Live Arcade, but I'm sure those will be few and far between.

AzBat

[openxdkman]

QUOTE

Starting this holiday, all Xbox LIVE users in selected regions will be able to download and play community games. For now, playing community games on Xbox LIVE starts with a Premium membership in the XNA Creators Club.

So for now it's $49 (for 4 month let's say) + Silver or Gold LIVE subscription

This summer it should be only the cost of LIVE subscription for players.

Still... money to give for homebrew... LIVE subscription value is the infrastructure able to absorb many online players. If homebrew is not an online game, I don't see the point of paying...

Since looking around for free flash games on PC will bring, for sure, at least, the same (off-line) pleasure, I don't see how xn/a can be promoted efficiently...

They should focus on online games. Instead of that they talk about 'old school' RPG's... There are tons of free solutions for making RPG homebrew.