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.

Machaira:

Brandon Bloom:

feature parody

Freudian slip?!? :D

Just overall poor spelling. I definitely meant parity. I can't write in cursive either :-)

I wood love to have some statics build in the new website that is comming in the near future

so we can see how manny times our games has been downloaded and played

mike

 

L0STlogic:

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

That's the whole point, so get excited! The Creators Club Subscription has always been for creators only, not for players. We never intended anyone to purchase a subsciption just to play games -- although it's certainly possible, and maybe some people will do it just to play games that would never be approved (only members can be game reviewers).

 

In the demo that was given Thursday afternoon at GDC, the profile page of a creator on the new web site showed a series of statistics for the creator. The team knows its important that creators know how many people are downloading their games etc. and will be working to get that information to creators.

"Q: Do I need an XNA Creators Club subscription to make games now?
A: No, but if you want to make the game available on the Xbox LIVE Community Games area, or peer review submitted games, you must be a subscriber."

Am I right in thinking that this means I can create games for 360 without a CC subscription (and can play them on my own 360 etc), but I need one to upload to community games? If so, this may be the motivation I needed to start using XNA.

You need a Creators Club subscription to create games for Xbox, or to run games given to you directly by other creators, or (as of this fall) to publish those games.

Once those games are published, other people who are not Creators Club subscribers can then play them.

The split is very simple: to create games, you need the subscription. To play them, you do not.

Jammy_Stuff:

"Q: Do I need an XNA Creators Club subscription to make games now? A: No, but if you want to make the game available on the Xbox LIVE Community Games area, or peer review submitted games, you must be a subscriber." Am I right in thinking that this means I can create games for 360 without a CC subscription (and can play them on my own 360 etc), but I need one to upload to community games? If so, this may be the motivation I needed to start using XNA.

You can't submit games to Community Games unless you are a CC subscriber. So you still need to get one to play your games on the 360.

Jammy_Stuff:

"Q: Do I need an XNA Creators Club subscription to make games now? A: No, but if you want to make the game available on the Xbox LIVE Community Games area, or peer review submitted games, you must be a subscriber."

I did mention to DaveMi(tchell) in IRC the other day that this question/answer sounded rather misleading as it even sounded to me (someone that knows all about CC) like perhaps CC had gone away for the 360. The fact the question ends with 'now' implying something had changed, and the fact it doesn't mention creating games for the 360 after 'but if you want to'... as something you need to pay for.

Shawn Hargreaves:

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.

 

I think the question most people are interested in Microsoft answering is: does it have to be a game at all? Will Microsoft prohibit non-game apps like a Folding@Home client? I understand that it may not even be possible due to the limitations of the XNA libraries and the use of C#, but just play along. ;) Just trying to get a feel for what non-game apps might be supported through the Peer Review process.

 

Tommy McClain

 

 

I hope this initiative lasts long enough for a good variety of games and whatever else people decide to make. You'll have to start bribing people if you don't get it through peer review. Personally I would  ban any kind of edutainment or anything without excessive baseball bat violence, only joking. I would love to see demo contest entries like Excess Evoid Droid, tech demos or anything thing really. If there isn't some kind of rating system I'm sure the good ones will get noticed by forum groups.

The last post I found on running games offline was dated Feb 17th, but I assume this restriction will still be in place when this new service is rolled out?

Shawn Hargreaves:

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.

That sounds great for the developer, but potentially less good for the user.  i.e. they don't want to download what they expect to be a game, only to discover it is in fact a "demo".

Will the developer have to provide a synopsis of their game (visible to potential users)?  Will the accuracy of that be part of the peer-review process? Will there be categories of games, so a user has the choice of filtering on "sports sims", "demos" etc.?

I'm also interested to see how user-reviews work.  I.e. wil you be able to filter on "games" given 5 stars only (by users, rather than peer reviewers)?  And what about systems to stop developers giving there own games lots of stars etc.?  And is browsing by name only, or with screen shots etc.?

Mrmuzz:

Will the developer have to provide a synopsis of their game (visible to potential users)?  Will the accuracy of that be part of the peer-review process? Will there be categories of games, so a user has the choice of filtering on "sports sims", "demos" etc.?

I'm also interested to see how user-reviews work.  I.e. wil you be able to filter on "games" given 5 stars only (by users, rather than peer reviewers)?  And what about systems to stop developers giving there own games lots of stars etc.?  And is browsing by name only, or with screen shots etc.?

Yes, the developer has to provide a description, and the description has to illustrate the contents. Otherwise, it might not pass the peer-review process.

A developer cannot rate his own game.

They mentioned that they plan to have a very usefull and nice search interface for Community Games, so expect quality stuff.

Other than that.... we have to wait.

DarthCheesiest:

The last post I found on running games offline was dated Feb 17th, but I assume this restriction will still be in place when this new service is rolled out?

I tried to bring up this point in this thread a couple of pages back, but there wasn't a response.  I hope the online requirement to play published games is dropped for release.  I understand being required to sign in to Live to deploy XNA games, but once they're published there shouldn't need to be any account checking once you download a game.  Unfortunately, you still need to be online to play the "sample" games at the moment, so I'm not sure if this will pan out.


Also, will there be categories for the XNA Community Games?  Something like: "Action", "Role-Playing", "Puzzle", ..., "Other"?  Whether assigned by the developer or peer reviewers, this would be invaluable.  If you only have a single list of games, it will be incredibly messy and slow if you have to wade through 500 games just to scroll down to the title you want.