MS to offer cheap 360 dev kits?

by Ken Weeks on Mar 22nd 2006 2:00AM

The lastest rumor at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose claims that Microsoft will announce a developers kit Wednesday costing about $100. Theoretically, this would open the door to the more Mom & Pop-type development shops and offer intriguing possibilities for low-cost online games and the XBL Arcade. Overall, it could just mean more games for the 360. Plus it makes Sony look overly corporate and out of touch with the little guy, no small feat when you're Microsoft.

MS isn't talking, but this could have cool implications. We'll see if it pans out over the next 24 hours.

[Thanks DJphatjive]

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Tags: dev kit, DevKit

Reader Comments (3)

Hmmm, sounds interesting :)
It could make hundreds of indie developers jump on the x360 train! Go go go small fun games!!

If this does happen, this might open up more sites who have games that they would want to put out their game on XBLA (any kind, including Flash based, like Zuma was), or put content on the marketplace. Also, who knows, this might possabily open up legal homebrew development (ofcoruse as long as MS put some heavy restraints to prevent illegal activies, like code to prevent bootloaders, accessing certain things like the EEPROM, BIOS, certain areas of the HDD, etc.).

But its still not confirmed yet or anything.

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but I'm guessing that MS is pushing XNA, and making the development tools for that cheap. XNA is the cross platform development tools that enable developers to create game base code that is usable by both the Windows OS and the Xbox OS. My guess is though that the feature set will be limited since I doubt it will include the Xbox 360 specific feature set. The base of XNA has to serve the lowest common denominator in terms of hardware.