I’m currently visiting beautiful Seattle (no, really! It is!) to attend Microsoft’s GameFest conference. And there’s lots of really useful information coming, but the most important bit was certainly this morning: MS will release a development environment for amateur game developers - FOR THE 360, no less.
This is a huge step forwards in terms of keeping games innovative and alive. And at some point, they really get it - they look at the movie and recording industry, and they see MySpace and GarageBand and YouTube. They realize that people want community involvement, not a one-way pipeline from the big publishers down to the peons who just shell out money.
MS actually will make their development environment available for free if you’re developing for Windows. And then, in one fell swoop, they lose touch. The XBox 360 development environment is going to cost $99 - per year. That’s not what everybody is waiting for - and it will keep a lot of kids (or their parents) from buying this environment.
To be fair, the XBox version will offer lots of free content, and if they keep adding free content every year, that might just be a viable approach. I guess the all-free route wasn’t palatable to the powers that be.
Overall, it’s still a huge win for game development. After a long hiatus, we’re slowly getting back to the point we were at in the early 80’s. * Computers are getting quite cheap again. (You can get a desktop w/ monitor for around $450) * Some form of computer is the hip thing for kids to have. It was the C=64, now it’s the XBox 360. * There’s a huge trend towards simpler (or Indy, or casual, or whatever you call them today) games. * We now have got a development environment where you can make games run on your home TV - and impress your friends with what you did
If YouTube and the others are any success, we’ll see a huge flood of crappy games - and a constant trickle of things that will amaze us, inspire us, and humble us.
I’m looking forward to it!
The cost for the xBox environment is a shame, but at $99 per year,it could have been a lot worse. Fingers crossed some takented people start having a go at it. If they can then sell their games through the online service, they could make their money back.
From the very little I know about game development in the good old days (i.e. the 1980s), it was possible for one-man teams to do all the programming and everything else for a game, just because there was so much less memory and machine capability available. I think for similar great game experiences nowadays, it’ll often take two or three really talented people working together to make it happen. But then, of course, nowadays the internet is more ubiquitous and the open source development method has a fair bit of maintream marketshare, so collaboration can be easier.
And on a completely unrelated topic, iCalFix iCalFix iCalFix