[news] Microsoft to sell home brew games, share revenue

[BlinkOk]

Microsoft to sell home brew games


"Calling all garage-game developers: How'd you like a piece of the Xbox 360 market?

Small-time gamemakers who create games using Microsoft's XNA development framework and port them to the Xbox 360's community games service will soon be able to sell their creations to other Xbox owners, Microsoft said Tuesday. Speaking Tuesday at the company's GameFest technology conference in Seattle, Microsoft exec Chris Satchell said that games that pass a peer-review process can be sold on the company's Xbox Live Marketplace downloadable game service."

[tomsamson]

I wondered if it was mentioned here and thought i should come in and talk about it if noone else did Nice you did

What´s your views on all this?
Would you be into working on a XNA game?

[moony4money]

If anyone in the LA area would like to get together and try their hand at an XNA studio, let me know. Looking for at least one artist and one programmer. I have industry experience (working as an Associate Producer for a San Mateo developer) and want to try my hand at the more independent, artistic scene.

I still have contacts from working on XBLA titles, so I may be able to get us some pretty good exposure as well, if the game is good enough. And I really want to make great games, so I am looking for people who want to bring their A-game.

[.hooligan]

Microsoft said that hobbyist gamemakers would be able to price their creations between 200 and 800 Microsoft Points, from $2.50 to $10. Of that, Satchell said that the creators would receive "up to" 70 percent of the revenue.

Sounds interesting but what does everyone think about the pricing. I guess if you gain popularity and because xbox live has a vast market it could be worth while.

[Son of Bryce]

I really think this sounds too good to be true. Knowing Microsoft there has to be a catch somewhere, haha.

I've been considering XNA development for a while, especially since the Xbox Live community announcement. This pretty much seals the deal since they never explicity stated whether you can charge for them or not.

This news also makes me wonder how this factors into Microsoft's decision to delist XBLA games that don't sell well or get good reviews.

[scheletro]

Thats very interesting, but some one here in the forum has tried XNA?

[Son of Bryce]

tom wrote an awesome comparison of XNA and Unity to Flash.

[Squize]

It's an expected, but still interesting move. I guess they have to validate XNA somehow, ie there needs to be an end result aside from just learning from it.

It's interesting in that XBLA isn't performing like it once was, the novelty seems to have worn off for a lot of their customers, and so whilst budgets for XBLA games are going up, returns are going down ( De-listing games seems to be a way of re-dressing that, but that has the negative effect of making what was once a safe sales avenue that much riskier now. If you were a small indy development company who got a game approved, and finally launched on there, you could be the victim of falling into a bigger games wake. Who'd want to have their game released a week after something like Sensi Soccer ? Before you'd have to swallow it and hope your game would either be a slow burner or a surprise hit, but now with de-listing games, the slow burner route may be taken away from you ).

Speaking for myself, I've got more full price retail games than XBLA ones, and I can't see that changing in the near future.

Squize.

[.hooligan]

Speaking for myself, I've got more full price retail games than XBLA ones, and I can't see that changing in the near future

Same here, but I think its because most of the time I'd prefer to pay high dollars for bigger budget higher quality games. Don't get me wrong I do get indie titles from XBLA, just not as inclined to. I think a big factor for me is that you can get demos of the titles. Not sure in all cases. If they didn't have that I wouldn't buy as many by far.

Also these titles get release along side of all these old ports right? Hard to compete with that content.

I read somewhere that it costed N+ 250K+ (might have that figure wrong, just remember it being rather high) to get their title out? So if you use XNA are all these costs avoided?

[tomsamson]

Several interesting thoughts there, i´ll drop in my 0.02
For usual XBLA games delisting is based on two´things:
-low sales for a longer timespan
and
-low average review scores for the title

So these both together should ensure that there´s no crappy content on the store for a long while.
While the delisting rules if any available haven´t been listed for XNA community games section content yet i´d imagine they set those up in similar fashion.
Therefore as long as a game had at least positive reviews in average it could still stay around for a good while and become a slow burner then.
I personally have more retail 360 games than XBLA games, too, but yeah, i also get one or two nice XBLA games every now and then, many seem to be like that, so yeah, with the small prices of the titles the mass of users that get em make the difference. I heard N+ did pretty well
Regarding development costs of titles sure they are in average higher than for the average flash web game, simply because you´d probably want to be able to compete with other XBLA or community area content.
On the other side yup, many costs implied when making a retail console game and even an XBLA game are not there with XNA and a release in the community games section.
Like you don´t need a devkit, you don´t have to translate the game to that many languages, don´t have to get an age rating in several countries etc etc.
There are some "but"s to this though:
-If you afterwards decide you actually want the game to become a usual XBLA title and pull that off with MS or another publisher then you again have to get an age rating, get your game translated for way more regions etc etc
and when a game is not age rated in the community area it is basically handled like a mature content game, so only adult users may get it.

Well, we´ll all see how it shapes up, to me it sounds pretty nice so far besides smaller kinks here and there