XBox Live for indy developers

[Spriggan]

Microsoft is planning on releasing a development kit for home brew games to be on Xbox live soon.  The beta of the software will be out at the end of this month then when it goes live the kit will cost $1,000, and considering a regular developer kit for XBLA costs about 30,000 this is a steal.

The downside to this is people have to pay an extra $100 a year to be able to access the Indy part of XBLA, you can't sell your games but instead place them in the Indy section and whoever is a subscriber to that feature can play any of the games.

Microsoft is also working to get these kits into colleges and high schools.

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/08/14/microsoft-plans-community-powered-arcade-with-new-xna-tools/

[Spriggan]

Another tidbit from Ars
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060813-7490.html

The games will work on XBLA as well as windows PC so you'd be developing for both platforms.

[Spriggan]

There's a FAQ about this on MSDN
http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/faq/

Few tid-bits, the free version will always be free but you cannot make commercial games and require you to have the same software installed on your PC to play the game, the 1000 dollar version is the commercial one that you can use to sell games to people.

So it looks like you can develop with the client for free to get use to it and make some games then upgrade if you want to go commercial, smart move Microsoft.

[Gemm: Rock & Roll Star; Born to Rock]

I've been reading some strange differences in the way this is going to be implemented. The part about paying $100 to get access to all the indy developments on the network, but then you need to get the code, compile it, and put it back onto your xbox, etc. There's lots of weird going-on's and I hope a more concrete position will be laid soon.

http://blog.wired.com/games/index.blog?entry_id=1540086

[Spriggan]

Ya how it works on the 360 is kind of crazy, since I don't have one though I'm only paying attention to the windows part of it which doesn't require the $100 subscription.