Is this something you can only do with a publishing contract?

Will this come in the April update when networking support is added?

CodeCube:

Is this something you can only do with a publishing contract?

probably

I hope that they make Achievements fair game to everyone, but only allow games with publishing contracts to give Gamer Points. Then it's fun for people playing the games, fun for people making the games, and still fair to people who don't play them (since all the achievements are 0 points).

 But I do hope they announce more on these plans soon.
 

CodeCube:

Will this come in the April update when networking support is added?

Network support is not being added in the april update.  At least not for game studio express ... but they haven't published any information about GSPro yet anyways

Aww.. I thought I read this on the update notes. I'm loosing my mind!

 Anyways thank you.
 

SimReality:

I hope that they make Achievements fair game to everyone

CodeCube:

SimReality:

I hope that they make Achievements fair game to everyone

The only problem with that is, how do they avoid abuse?  What's to stop someone from creating a game that will grant 10,000 achievements within a 5 minute timespan?  what does that mean for other "paying" users of the xbox live service?

 They can impose the same limit on the number of achiements as they do for arcade games. Plus, who cares if somebody gets 10,000 achievements if they are all 0 points? Anybody could just look and see it was a homebrew game and figure out that if no points were given, it doesn't matter. I don't know anyone who brags about number of achievements, just the points.
 

SimReality:

 They can impose the same limit on the number of achiements as they do for arcade games. Plus, who cares if somebody gets 10,000 achievements if they are all 0 points?

For instance:

What if I make a game that just immediately gives 10,000 achievements to the person playing it? What if I also put obscenities in the description of these achievements? I distribute this game, and everyone who is fooled into running it gets their gamertag spammed with all this junk. Now not only can they no longer find the achievements from the real games that they want to play (they'd be buried down the bottom of a ridiculously long list) but whenever they go to play some other game, people will be sending negative feedback about them because of the obscenities that appear in their gamercard. Not exactly a great experience, and not at all what Live is supposed to be about!

That's just one example: there are many more such.

This is not to say that zero point achievements aren't interesting, but it is far from obvious how these could be made to work in a safe and secure way.

Never thought of that before.

 Well hopefully all you smart people at MS figure out a way for us to use achievements without the jerks abusing it. :)