I managed to make it to the great keynote, but one thing has been bothering me since then. The peer review process will catch the games which breach copyright, and those which have inappropriate content and obvious bugs/errors. My concern is with general playability and consistency. This is taken care of professionally with the TCR process and it would probably be logistically impossible to do so with the community games. However, would it be possible to put out a suitable set of TCR-like guidelines for community game developers? Obviously, people won't have to follow them, but I suspect that many would at least try to adhere to the design and implementation principles within the guidelines.

Adam Miles:

I'm curious why there should be a download limit in the 150MB range given that (at least according to the creators club game launcher) it'll be hard drive only? Of course, if this is just a temporary thing and memory card users are included come the beta/full release then it's more understandable. Demos appear to be allowed to be as big as necessary, I've seen some over 1.3GB, and arguably you'd get less gameplay from such a demo than you would from Dishwasher or Little Gamers. Is this limit set in stone, or is it going to track with the XBLA limit?

Bandwidth isn't free.

Rockzilla:

So what is to stop professional game companies making games with XNA, and avoiding the whole costly submission / extensive testing processes etc.

For starters: achievements. These games won't have achievements which is a BIG selling point. Are you going to pay $10 for decent arcade-style game A or $10 for decent arcade-style game with achievements B? You are more likely to go with B. Sure quality still matters to a degree, but for some people those achievements alone are worth the money. And not getting them makes it much more important that you have a good game.

Another thing is online leaderboards. With a publishing contract those are provided to you. With the XNA Community Games route you don't have them. And since you can't do custom internet connections on the Xbox, there's no way for you to host a database elsewhere and use that.

Admittedly not, but the $99 a year for CC will more than cover the bandwidth costs for the vast majority of developers whose relatively small games get downloaded very infrequently. Those titles that do end up getting downloaded thousands, or potentially hundreds of thousands of times are doing Microsoft a big enough service I think that bandwidth costs are going to be insignificant. The free PR (and small boost in 360 sales) a *REAL* hit community game would generate (think Goldeneye levels of excitement) would be sufficient that I don't imagine bandwidth costs really being the reason behind a filesize cap...

Also, when eventually it comes to the point where developers get to choose a price for their game, I hope we finally get to see microtransactions done properly, rather the 400/800 scheme we have now, let the developers truly choose the price, so perhaps increments of 10 from 0 to 100, then 50 point increments there on.

Perhaps a reasonable cap on free titles and a much higher cap (~ 2 GB) on non-free titles would work.  With revenue sharing on the non-free titles, that could help offset the bandwidth costs, if that is indeed the issue.  I would agree that requiring a HDD for larger titles is perfectly reasonable.


Have there been any announcements on XNA Framework/runtime changes/additions for 3.0?

This is the most utterly incredible news I have heard, so good I feel like quiting my job and devoting my life to becoming a better programmer.  Why do I think that having this ability will make me miraculously better at producing games, because I do. Why do I think that getting a game on this service will solve all my problems, don't know. I am just excited.

I think that this must affect Xbox live, there are some games that I think are bog standard in execution or design and I can't see these titles being too successful in future. If Aquaria came out on Live Arcade or this new service I would buy it(I want to buy it), I am not interested in achievements or rankings on a game like that. There doesn't seem to be much of an advantage having the game on live arcade.

I love wiki and youtube because sometimes I will be reminded of something from my past and will search forit and usually find something, or find something that I would have otherwise not been able to see(model aeroplane exhibitions) and I believe the same will occur with games, there are many Japanese type shooter that I like and with links to similar things this could be incredible.

Games which aren't so marketable, more games, more variety. This is just so good, the more I think about it the more I disbelieve it. 

 

I would agree that achievements are a big deal and will swing a fair few consumers....

Are you allowing (or even forcing) the demo system that surrently operates with all XBLA titles?

I guess the intention is to have litterally thousands of games on there? once again seperatitng the XBLA from the XNA. Perhaps it's like - would you rent a DVD? or spend all night messing around on youtube? there is a place for both.

There is a lot of good stuff on Youtube and Wikipedia, which I don't think I would be able to get elsewhere and certainly not easily and with both of them you can kind of get sucked in to finding interesting things that you hadn't thought of and wouldn't have searched for.

This is kind of going on the assumption that there will be a nice interface and lots of searching and link features like youtube.

Will a connection to Xbox Live still be required to play published XNA games once they have been downloaded?

This seems to be the case for the released samples, though I'm hoping this is not the case for the final released version.

Chris Covington:

I managed to make it to the great keynote, but one thing has been bothering me since then. The peer review process will catch the games which breach copyright, and those which have inappropriate content and obvious bugs/errors. My concern is with general playability and consistency. This is taken care of professionally with the TCR process and it would probably be logistically impossible to do so with the community games. However, would it be possible to put out a suitable set of TCR-like guidelines for community game developers? Obviously, people won't have to follow them, but I suspect that many would at least try to adhere to the design and implementation principles within the guidelines.

There's lots of places where you can find guidance on good game design on the internet.  TCRs don't take care of that.  TCRs give you requirements on safe screen areas, multiplayer gaming, leaderboards, achievements, storage requirements, etc.  Yes, you can say that some of those issues touch on playability and consistency, but I don't think we're going to take a stance of requiring something like that.  However, I think your suggestion is a good one regarding publishing a design guide.  We will consider this in the coming months.

I wonder, will users need to pay for an XNA CC subscription if a game has the XNA networking implemented?  Or will it be possible to release a game with networking for no cost to the end user?

BIG JG 1:

Hopefully this the correct thread for this. I assume this new system is for Original Games only. So  that joe blow couldnt make a game based off mario or halo characters and then have it published on xbox live. I would assume that the original developers of those characters would go after you.

The peer reviewers would hopefully catch that and prevent such a game being published in the first place. If they missed it (maybe the copied thing was very obscure so none of the reviewers recognised it) then anyone could complain after the game was published. If we investigated the complaint and found it was valid, we'd take the game down from Marketplace.

Nothing we are doing here changes anything about how copyright law works. If a character, world, model, sound, texture, etc, belongs to someone else, you cannot use it in your game.