I am working on a project that has reached sufficient maturity that we want to test out LIVE matchmaking. We are willing to purchase a creator's club membership for each tester -- but do we need an XBOX for each tester as well? What are our options?

You do not need an Xbox 360 for each tester, a Windows Xp/Vista PC will suffice.  You will need to purchase a LIVE Gold subscription as well as the CC membership subscription when testing over LIVE.

Thanks Rico. I purchased CC using my XBOX360. Is there an explanation in the FAQs for how to buy a CC memembership without an XBOX? I haven't come across a webpage for doing this...

Hi.

I'm not sure about buying a membership without a Xbox, but i think, you can just login on your Xbox with another (gold) account and buy the CC via Xbox. Then you can use this account on your PC to test Xbox Live Matchmaking.

Ah, good idea Parceval. This will work! Thanks.

Hi Shawn. We are testing games built using matchmaking and to do this, we are sharing LIVE and CC accounts so that some testers/developers can test on their two machines. Buying two live accounts and two CC accounts per dev/tester is quite a burden. My question for you is this -- would getting an XBOX dev kit remove this costly limitation? Or are we missing something? The LIVE matchmaking is an important feature that the network play builds upon, so I am not sure that we could use system link exclusively.

Chromatic:

Buying two live accounts and two CC accounts per dev/tester is quite a burden. My question for you is this -- would getting an XBOX dev kit remove this costly limitation? Or are we missing something?

If you think 2 CC+Live accounts is a burden, then dev kit is probably out of your reach. ;)

The cost is pretty high considering XNA GSE can not be used for commercial purposes on xbox.

Waruwaru:

Chromatic:

Buying two live accounts and two CC accounts per dev/tester is quite a burden. My question for you is this -- would getting an XBOX dev kit remove this costly limitation? Or are we missing something?

If you think 2 CC+Live accounts is a burden, then dev kit is probably out of your reach. ;)

The cost is pretty high considering XNA GSE can not be used for commercial purposes on xbox.

It might also help to note that Microsoft doesn't just sell dev-kits. You have to have a contract set up with a publishing schedule before you can get one, no matter what you are offering.

Your best bet is still to either get a bunch of Xboxs or PCs and pay for the memberships and subscriptions if testing the matchmaking is important to you.

Okay. Does anyone know if having an XBOX dev kit alleviates the time and implementation burden related to having to create Gold and CC accounts for devs and testers using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Net?

The Xbox dev kit has nothing to do with the Creators Club membership. Just forget about the dev kit.

Ooops - moderation accident... see continuation here http://forums.xna.com/thread/44557.aspx