Going by the Gamasutra article it does indeed look as though the beta will be US based. Given that XBox Live content is split by region, that pretty much means that europe is going to have to miss the beta for some strange reason. Hopefully the article is wrong on this as I don't see how that actually works in practice. It's kind of like giving the US a head start in getting their XNA games out to the public.

Penhalion Wolfe:

Going by the Gamasutra article it does indeed look as though the beta will be US based. Given that XBox Live content is split by region, that pretty much means that europe is going to have to miss the beta for some strange reason. Hopefully the article is wrong on this as I don't see how that actually works in practice. It's kind of like giving the US a head start in getting their XNA games out to the public.

The beta would be to make sure the distribution system works, not to get your game out. The public isn't going to see whatever is done on the beta so there's not going to be any "head start". The people involved in the beta aren't going to get their games out to the community any quicker than any one else.

There's nothing preventing you from making your game now and being ready when the system goes live.

Also of note for those who didn't make it to the discussion, any games submitted during the beta will have to be resubmitted when the distribution system goes live.

I figured that would go without saying, but I guess it's always good to state. :)

 

Edit: gamasutra has up a detailed review of the discussion on things.

Blazon:

What I ultimately want to see is a LIVE Community Games channel that is available to both Windows and the XBOX 360.   Games that are designed to work with both platforms, or just one of them, would be marked appropriately.

I think ultimately, the XNA team would love to see 100% feature parody for every platform. I have absolutely no knowledge of what is being planned, but I'd assume a Windows flavor is at least on the drawing board for both XBLA and XNA.

Off hand, I can think of one large barrier to XNA Community Games for Windows Live: non-standardized hardware! It is extremely difficult to develop Windows games that run uniformly across a wide range of machines in terms of performance and capabilities. The XNA Framework helps lessen the incompatabilities, but there is still a lot of problems which can arrise such as having fall-back shaders and the need for dynamic level of detail. That's not even to mention driver bugs and other anomolies.

When I was preparing the Racing Game starter kit for release, we submitted the game to a compatibility lab and there was a reasonable range of odd configuration specific problems which needed to be fixed. Independent game developers simply do not have those resources. Other teams at Microsoft are working to make this easier. Some examples include the capability standardization in D3D 10 and 10.1 as well as Vista's "Experience Index". Again, I don't have any clue what work is being done (if any) for community games on Windows, but I'd suspect the work is dependent on these future simplification regarding machine performance and capabilities.

As long as people do not need XNA subscriptions to play the peer approved games I'm super excited about this. :)

I noticed while reading the article about th submission process that you can specify the platform for your game. Does this mean that we'll be able to upload Windows (and Zune) games at some point?

Not likely Zune, since Zune does not connect to Live!

Who knows what they have planned for the long-term. Maybe they are planning for a similar "portal" for Windows also. But nothing is currently known.

Brandon Bloom:

I think ultimately, the XNA team would love to see 100% feature parody for every platform.

Freudian slip?!? :D

I think the bottom line is that we are all super excited about this.  If all is too broad I'll limit my comments to myself.  The market may get flooded, it may not, but this is a great learning oppurtinity for us all.  Have a vendor supported open platform is fantastic.  Good luck to all that create. 

Will Xbox LIVE Community accept things like machinima and demos(the demoscene kind of demo) made with XNA? or it will be only for games.

Edison S. Prata Jr:

Will Xbox LIVE Community accept things like machinima and demos(the demoscene kind of demo) made with XNA? or it will be only for games.

We don't care.

Our peer review process is only intended to address questions like "is this content legal? Does it contain prohibited material such as pornography? Does it run correctly, or crash all the time". There is absolutely no portfolio management, which means we will never reject a game because of subjective judgements such as "I don't think it's fun", or "I don't think it's any good", or even "huh, I'm not sure this even counts as a game at all".

If you want to upload something, you can, as long as it doesn't contain anything absolutely prohibited. Deciding whether it is good or not is entirely between you and your end users: if they don't like it, they can ignore it, but we aren't going to filter what's available based on any quality or genre judgements from our end.