Microsoft has just confirmed that community games made with XNA will be made available on Xbox Live this year.
Microsoft’s XNA head Chris Satchell said that gamers will be free to upload games to the service within certain ground rules. Each user will have an XNA Creator Identity which wil act in the same way as a GamerTag, allowing bedroom coders to set sliders to show how violent their game is. Once self-rated, games can then be sent for peer review.
Satchell estimated that about 1,000 user-created games will be on Live before the end of the year. Demos of user-made games Jellycar, Dishwasher and other community-developed titles are now available as trial versions on Live.
The news came out of the GDC keynote from Microsoft’s John Schappert.






DrDamn said:
Interesting. Game 3.0 anyone?
patlike said:
Bertie reckons the games aren’t up on Live at the moment. F’SHAME, MICROSOFT.
DrDamn said:
Should hopefully see some much needed innovation and variety on XBLA. PSN currently kicks it’s arse for downloadable little games. Pricing is also seriously better on PSN. So is all this stuff going to free/cheap? Or do devs get to set a price?
patlike said:
I assumed it was free. From the EG coverage there was no mention of any charge at all.
DrDamn said:
Thats very cool then. Will check for the demos later.
Blerk said:
I’m imagining it as sort of a NewGrounds for XNA stuff. Which should be great, in theory.
No mention of them dropping the fee for signing up to the creators network, though? That’d have helped them even more.
patlike said:
I don’t think they said anything about that, nope. I certainly haven’t seen anything.