SomeRhino:

I think "Community Games" should actually be games, and any physics demos, etc. should remain in the PC world where they can be analyzed better anyway.

Well this is up to the creators to decide, you guys do the reviewing! What I'd prefer (and expect) to see is that most of the stuff that passes review is indeed a real game, good or bad. However, I expect that a fair few cool tech demos will be worth sharing with the world.

A cube with a bunch of lighting techniques? Not so much.
A fire physics demo in which you've got a room where you can just burn random things and watch the fire spread; absolutely no goals or game play? Some one might find that sort of thing fun. Who knows?

But the point is: We (the XNA team, the community, everyone) have no idea what sort of wacky stuff people are going to dream up. Someone might create a game engine and with a fantastic tool like Epic's Matinee and the XNA channels could get flooded with machinima!

I think that's the fun part of this whole adventure: it's wide open and it's going to be a good ride.

Ideally, I agree that the Community Games section should be for complete games. However, there are two problems with this:

1. People will (try to) put up demos, alphas and betas anyway.
2. Who are we to decide what constitutes a "full" game?

We can solve this by simply not allowing unfinished games, but things will slip through and it does not solve problem #2 above. That is why I proposed an additional descriptor for demo/alpha/beta so that the peer review process could more easily reject things that are not categorized properly as well as providing more filtering options for the community.

ShawMishrak:

zook83:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Xbox LIVE connection is not required to play XNA downloaded games. I didn't accept the "this game requires an Xbox LIVE connection" message when I played the JelliCar game and it run without problems.

I got an error message when I tried to launch the XNA sample games without an internet/Live connection.

I got an error message too, saying the system couldn't connect to Xbox LIVE. It also asked me if I wanted to try the Internet connection but I said "No" and the game (JelliCar) was executed without problems.

zook83:

ShawMishrak:

zook83:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Xbox LIVE connection is not required to play XNA downloaded games. I didn't accept the "this game requires an Xbox LIVE connection" message when I played the JelliCar game and it run without problems.

I got an error message when I tried to launch the XNA sample games without an internet/Live connection.

I got an error message too, saying the system couldn't connect to Xbox LIVE. It also asked me if I wanted to try the Internet connection but I said "No" and the game (JelliCar) was executed without problems.

Interesting.  When I click "No" I get the "this game requires a Live connection" error.  I wonder why it works for you.

I think I'm going to have to disagree with Nick + others from the last couple of pages on what should and shouldn't go on the Community Arcade. I think so long as whatever it is, works, it should be allowed to go up there. If someone wants to release a slideshow of nature images set to music because they think it looks cool, then I see no reason why it shouldn't be allowed to. Personally I still want to finish writing my networked raytracer which, if it made pretty enough pictures that people wanted to spend time designing scenes and rendering images, then I don't see why that shouldn't be allowed either. I think you start getting into very dodgy territory when you start trying to decide what is/isn't a game.

I fully appreciate the fact that you don't want the service diluted by hundreds of bits of rubbish, but we've yet to see the powerful search functionality, categories and rating system that will let the great stuff rise to the surface and the rubbish stuff stay hidden behind 5 levels of categories and menus. I think so long as there are categories for Full Games, Demos, and perhaps Other, there won't be an issue with that. I know it's been said, even by some Microsoft folk in the last week that this shouldn't be for alpha/beta testing a game, and I agree, but surely what better way of finding out whether your game idea is actually fun than releasing a polished demo of whatever it is you're making, seeing what people make of it, and building from there. I must be clear though, there's a difference between a demo and an alpha version of a game, and we certainly don't want the latter, but I see no issue with either the former, or things that aren't games at all, but yet are still in a working and bug-free state.

Traditionally game developers using the Marketplace have made demos after the game has gone Gold, or just before, leaving little/no time for user feedback when really a demo released many months before launch would serve to make the end product better than it would have been without it.

I was certainly encouraged by Shawn's comments about it not being the job of the peer reviewers to really decide whether something qualifies as a game at all, I just hope that extends to things that most definitely aren't games, and don't pretend to be.

I definitely see your point Adam. I hadn't considered things like slideshows and raytracers before. Things that are fully working products (such as a demo representing your full game, the slideshow you mentioned, or your raytracer) should be allowed up. I'm more worried about alpha/beta products that aren't finished or are simple tech-demos. Now, if you have a fully realized fire tech-demo where you can walk around a room lighting stuff on fire watching it spread, it should be allowed because that's definitely an innovative idea, but there should be some sort of criteria. I don't want to see dozens of "look at my per-pixel lighting" demos.

If there are going to be tech-demos and things like slideshows and raytracers, then there really needs to be a better categorization method in place. If we just go with genres, how are you ever going to fit a raytracer into that? Perhaps a listing of genres for finished games, a game demo area, and an other area would suffice. That way people looking for finished games don't find your raytracer that they might not have any interest in.

It's all in the consumer appeal and consumer expectations. That's the key (and my hope) in all of this is that people can go into the Community Games section, open up the Action genre, and know that whatever they download will be a fully finished action game. It might not be the greatest game ever with top of the line art, and it might only last for 20 minutes, but at least they know it isn't a tech-demo. As long as the organization is set up appropriately, there really isn't a problem here.

I don't have a problem with demos and other misc. programs as long as they're marked as such and placed in another category.  It would just be annoying to decide to download a game, and have to wade through a list where 9 out of every 10 items is a tech demo or slide show.  Hence, I see there being two levels of "quality assurance:"

1. Peer reviewers should primarily make sure the games/programs are bug-free, to the maximum extent that this is possible without code and limited time.  Games that are unreliable and crash under normal gameplay are just no fun and I would have no qualms giving negative (though constructive) reviews to games that crash when I play through them.
   
2. Peer reviewers should make sure the programs are properly categorized.  Demos should be marked as demos, full games marked as full games, tech demos marked as demos or tech demos, etc.

SomeRhino:

Shawn Hargreaves:

We don't care...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".

I'm not sure if I like this idea. The majority of users downloading these games are going to expect them to be games. Judgements on whether or not the game is fun could probably be discarded, but when it gets to the point of someone downloading the game "SuperLight" only to find that it's a demo with a cube bouncing around the screen with different lighting effects, users are going to be turned off.

It's important to separate the purpose of the peer review with quality review.

I assume that after games are published, we will have some mechanism for users to vote on them so the best ones can bubble to the top. I don't work on the team that is building this stuff, so I don't know the details (most likely those aren't finalized yet, and we'll probably be improving and tweaking this stuff for years to come) but the important point for now is that peer review by other creators is not the same thing as quality review by gamers.

Peer review is basically only intended to answer the question "are we going to upset/offend anyone, or get in legal trouble, if this content goes up on Marketplace?".

Voting on things like "is this game fun?", or "huh? what was this dude thinking? That's the most stupid thing I ever saw!" is a separate process, and will happen elsewhere.

Our goal here is to empower the community, and an important part of this is accepting the fact that large communities are full of different ideas and varied opinions. It's ok for people to disagree, and it's ok for people to upload weird stuff that maybe only a couple of other people are likely to 'get'. Good luck to you! Who knows, maybe that weird joke that nobody understood at first will suddenly take off and turn out to be the next Big Thing on the Internet (think lolcats, I Kiss You, etc).

I actually think this is the coolest thing about enabling community distribution. When the ability to publish a game is limited by just a handful of publishers, only the most traditional and mainstream things stand a chance of getting released. But what if I don't like mainstream stuff? I think it's great that as long as there is at least one person out there who wants to make something, and at least one other person who thinks that thing is cool, they can have some change to get together and make each other happy. Who cares if that leaves everyone else scratching their heads because they can't even figure out what genre this weird thing should be categorized under?

I agree with Adam Miles' last response.

Thank God the review process in the Gamasutra article seems free of places where you can just arbitrarily dismiss a game or start giving advice. Hopefully people will be able to spam comments on the game after it is released. I think for the paid downloads, a free demo should be required and also information about what gets unlocked or some kind of free timed trial(a day or so) which gets deleted, or something.

roflcopter at "I kiss you"

Hey,  when i look for  "XNA Creators Club Game Launcher"   i don't find it, only the creaters game launcher. was this a limited time thing or something please?

Nutty :p

Actually what I meant was, getting comments during the review phase would be fine, but getting stipulations about quality or kind of content would be miserable.

So what happens when a game comes up for review that doesn't violate any content rules (no copyright infringement, etc.) but crashes when you select "Start Game"?  There has to be some level of quality assurance.

That is covered(no crashing). However I know most of the PC games I've played have crashed and console games are not immune these days either, so I think this is a bit harsh, but it keeps the process clear and specific.

I think having a clear set of things that aren't allowed is sensible, If they want to add many tickboxes like twenty hours of play, no paint packages, music packages, light shows, mini games whatever they can, but I am glad they haven't mentioned anything to do with quality or program type.

'We will reject games that are incomplete', I assume that depends on the user description, so does it match your description, so again quite specific.

I think they must keep what fails a user submission specific and decided beforehand, otherwise there could be a lot of  scope for strife in the community.

 

Oooooo, new web site or maybe an old one http://www.xna.com/ , just saw new xna graphics on a Gamasutra banner advert.

Some one mentioned that they would not be happy seeing pixel shader demos. But then where do you draw the line, possibly on something that would not have been considered to be a game but would equally entertain. Hopefully, less restriction = more variety = more users(not typical gamers maybe), the 360 is an entertainment system not just a Halo player.

I am glad that we won't be able to decide what should be allowed, as I don't think we are best people to do this.

ShawMishrak:

Interesting.  When I click "No" I get the "this game requires a Live connection" error.  I wonder why it works for you.

I don't know why the game works for me without Internet connection, but not for you. Even I disconnected the Ethernet cable... Somebody knows if Xbox LIVE connection is needed to play Community demos? I played the JelliCar one, it's the truth :-D

Well, summing up, these are the generalized opinions:

- Only (full, bug-free) games must be allowed or
- Whatever (full, bug-free) content must be allowed but
  - The classifying system must provide "demo", "other" and similar categories in which add that kind of content in order to avoid user frustration.

What's the Microsoft opinion? You XNA guys have said all kind of content must be allowed but, what about the classifying system?

btw, how can I edit my XNA Creators Club profile in order to add my bio and other information?

Hey all back from hiatus;)  Spending so much time on Number Guess 2k8 extreme beta last fall got me behind at work.  Since then I have deployed a new time clock system, a new web site, and replaced a Samba server with Server 2k3. and I have started work on deploying Microsoft RMS.  After RMS is done, it looks like we are moving to Dynamics for all the GL work.  I think you could say we are a Microsoft shop again;)

Wow, I have to say, bravo nice work on the announcement last week;)

Since I am wet behind the ears here again, I have to ask, when making the categories, could you make one category just for "Mashup" material?  That is just bits of games that are designed to be mashed up into other peoples creations.  Be it art, or a special effect or a little inteligent agent.

Anyhow, WTG, Microsoft FTW!!!  Down with $ony!

BlueNutty:

Hey,  when i look for  "XNA Creators Club Game Launcher"   i don't find it, only the creaters game launcher. was this a limited time thing or something please?

Nutty :p

From the XNA Team Blog (subscribe to the feed):

Due to overwhelming response, we've decided to extend the time window where people can download the XNA Creators Club Game Launcher and play the games during the trial of Xbox LIVE Community Games - the new deadline is Tuesday, Feb 26th  Midnight PST.  The games themselves still expire on March 9th, but this gives a little more time for people to get the launcher so that you can download and play the games.

zook83:

  - The classifying system must provide "demo", "other" and similar categories in which add that kind of content in order to avoid user frustration.

What's the Microsoft opinion? You XNA guys have said all kind of content must be allowed but, what about the classifying system?

I don't think that is finalized yet. These are still early days...

Two important points here:

• This sort of thing is exactly what the beta is for. There's a reason we are doing such a long beta before launching this for real, compared to the very short framework betas we have typically done in the past. We need you to to try publishing some games, push some boundaries, and give us feedback on how the process is working. Without that practical experience, we'd just be guessing as to what sort of stuff people are likely to want to do, and the odds of us guessing exactly right are pretty low :-) So please use the beta, push those boundaries as far as you can, and keep the feedback coming!

• This side of things is likely to go on evolving even after we launch to consumers this fall. We'll obviously need some kind of searching and categorizing functionality right from day 1, but initially there will be what, maybe 100 or 1000 games? So it doesn't need to be perfect. Over time, the number of games in the system will go up, and over time we will improve the details of how we manage them and what kind of UI we present for interacting with them. This is really an unsolved problem: there are many websites that deal with this kind of volume of user generated content, but nobody has tried to do this on a TV screen using a console gamepad before! So I would expect to see a (hopefully reasonably good) first attempt, followed by a period of iterative improvements as we learn what works and improve our design. As long as we can improve fast enough to keep up as you guys fill the system up with ever more games, all will be well.
  

GregA:

I have to ask, when making the categories, could you make one category just for "Mashup" material?  That is just bits of games that are designed to be mashed up into other peoples creations.  Be it art, or a special effect or a little inteligent agent.

I think that kind of material must be shared outside the new system the XNA team is preparing for us. That system is intended to be used as a publishing tool, yes, but only for playable content which ANY Xbox 360 user can use. Developing content is neither playable nor usable by ANY user, only developers. I think that kind of content must be shared by using other systems, like CodePlex or similar. I've developed an AI system (concretely, an automated planning one) and I'm not going to share it via Xbox LIVE. It will be hosted on CodePlex (www.codeplex.com/Aran).

It looks very promising, but it might scare a few indies away.
 I mean if people can download games freely, especially casual gamers (some of whom don't give anything about achievements). How are indies going to "compete" with a college team of 18 students vs a small studio of 3 to 6 people?
Sure the best games will get out there anyway, but for me as an indie it's very scary to see the market saturated and then having to hold the hope that the game I develop with XNA will somehow be noticed.

Currently as this is still going to be a beta I'm more curious than scared about it. And I would love to see the peer review to be used to test out demo's.The thing is I'm not sure I'll have the financial means to try it out (waiting for peer review costs time, time I might not have).

As I see it the new structure to bring out a "succesfull game" would be to get a demo peer reviewed, and if the game is a success and gets positive peer reviews,  to develop it further into a full fledged game.

This brought me to the idea of sponsoring game development, would it be possible to sponsor further development of a game? In the form of credits, as in "I loved the demo, and if the developpers gets 100 000 points he'll be able to eat and make it into a full fledged game on XBLA". Let the users the liberty to sponsor developpers.

Also a big problem is the intellectual property rights... especially if you are going to do this worldwide and in some countries you will need signed agreements from the authors to prove that you can show their games. It's all going to be fun and games untill money gets involved and somebody sues... Peer review is the best way to avoid questionable content, but it doesn't protect somebody from accidentally remaking a game from the 1980's and having an unhappy coder showing up on the doorstep claiming you ripped them off.

Shawn Hargreaves:

I actually think this is the coolest thing about enabling community distribution. When the ability to publish a game is limited by just a handful of publishers, only the most traditional and mainstream things stand a chance of getting released. But what if I don't like mainstream stuff? I think it's great that as long as there is at least one person out there who wants to make something, and at least one other person who thinks that thing is cool, they can have some change to get together and make each other happy. Who cares if that leaves everyone else scratching their heads because they can't even figure out what genre this weird thing should be categorized under?

This is great, but keep in mind the Creators Club members will be carrying the load of the review process.  If we get over loaded with 1000 ( Exagerrating ) "My First XNA ________" projects to review...then we'll be the ones who care.

Does this create a Catch 22?

For example, if in peer review I came across a "Game" that only allows you to rotate a camera around a model I would reject it based on the following criteria:

Mitch Walker:

You should only "release" finished games.

But, couldn't that creator say that I am censoring their creative project?  (...but maybe really just want their friends to be able to download their demo )

So what consitutes the difference between "released" finished games and creativity?

I'm guessing there are enough barriers to entry ( $100 creators club membership, 1 game allowed in review at a time per creator ) so that peer review pipeline won't get overloaded.  I sure hope so.

Just my 1.5f cents.

- Matt D

Tigernado:

Oh ok. I do eventually want to get a Xbox 360 anyway.

(now I wish Nintendo had its own creator's club for wii/ds...heh)

Nintendo does not have a "creator's club" for the wii, but you can make homebrew games for the ds in any C-based language.  (Don't quote me on this though, it may be C++)

are we going to upset/offend anyone, or get in legal trouble, if this content goes up on Marketplace?

The last thing you would want is for some random sampling of volounteer strangers to decide whether you yourself will get into legal trouble for doing something.