XNA Studio 2 Released

With the release of Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio 2.0, Microsoft edges closer to a publishing pipeline for the amateur development community.
“It’s our next big step in democratizing game development,” XNA general manager Chris Satchell told Next-Gen regarding the release of Game Studio 2.0, which launches Thursday at http://creators.xna.com/.

Satchell’s ultimate vision is to create what he has in the past called a “YouTube for Games” on consoles, where users can create a game and share it with the development and gaming community at large, and at will.

Microsoft isn’t quite there yet, but Satchell reveals that the vision is becoming reality, perhaps sooner than expected.

“Once you’ve given people that publishing pipeline of the community, that’s just a huge deal in the industry. That’s a discontinuity. That’s never been done on a games console before.

“I can confirm that [a user-generated program] is actively in development here. We’ve been working on it for a while, and early next year, we’re going to have some major announcements about the details of what this publishing pipeline for the community looks like.”

Satchell said that details about the business model surrounding the program would be announced next year as well.

"Xbox 360 will still have triple-A games, will still have Xbox Live Arcade games, but will also have this whole 'Community Arcade' idea," he added.

XNA Game Studio is development software targeted at student, hobbyist and independent game developers, allowing them to create games playable on PC and Xbox 360.

With Game Studio 2.0, developers now have the ability to add voice chat and matchmaking features to their games, without the need for complicated coding. The new toolset also lets developers develop games that can be played cross-platform between Xbox 360 and PC via Xbox Live and Games for Windows—Live.

Game Studio 2.0 also fully supports game development with all versions of the Microsoft Visual Studio product line.

The original XNA Game Studio launched about a year ago, and boasts around 750,000 downloads. More than 300 universities have adopted the software, and Satchell said that some bigger developers have told him that they have used XNA Game Studio for very raw prototyping before moving onto more serious prototyping using XDK or DirectX SDK.

Microsoft will also provide a free academic trial membership in the XNA Creators Club beginning in January.

Dream-Build-Play 2008

Microsoft also announced its Dream-Build-Play 2008 game development competition. Registration for the Silicon Minds Warm-Up Challenge begins this week, and winners of that challenge will be announced at the Game Developers Conference in February, where details of the main challenge will be revealed.

Warm-Up Challenge prizes include an opportunity to interview for an internship with one of the challenge’s organizers: Microsoft Research’s Machine Learning Group in Cambridge, England; Rare Ltd.; and Lionhead Studios. The challenge will be to create a small game based around A.I.

News-Source: Next-Gen