Microsoft's XNA beta released today

by Joystiq Staff { Aug 30th 2006 at 4:25PM }

Wannabe game developers will now have the chance to delve into the world of criticism as Microsoft made available their XNA Game Studio Express beta today. The tools can be downloaded here. It's going to get a whole helluva lot more interesting to see what can come out of the brains of those who maybe lacked the funds but not the passion to make fun games.

As was stated earlier when it was announced, games built on Windows will also carry the ability to be migrated to the Xbox 360 starting this holiday as part of the XNA Creators Club. Of course, you'll have to cough up some dough first. The subscription is $99 for a year or a four-month trial cost of $49. Now it's time for those that complain about staleness in the industry to actually do something about it.

Check out the full press release after the break, which includes some info on the Torque X beta program.

Creativity Knows No Bounds: Microsoft Opens Access to Public to Create Windows and Xbox 360 Games

XNA Game Studio Express Beta Available For Download Today

Microsoft today released the public beta of XNA Game Studio Express, the pioneering technology designed to open up game development to new audiences, including hobbyists, students and independent developers, in the hopes of injecting a shot of creativity into the electronic entertainment industry.

Novice game creators can download the tool today from http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna to develop games for Windows XP and Windows Vista, at no charge. The games built on Windows can be migrated to the Xbox 360 console system starting this holiday season as part of the XNA Creators Club subscription for $99 a year, or a four-month trial cost of $49, opening up retail console game development to anyone for the first time.

Since the announcement of XNA Game Studio Express' upcoming availability on August 14, the public response has been overwhelming – more than 100 schools have requested information on how they can incorporate XNA Game Studio Express into their curricula and the breakthrough news has generated millions of hits on Internet search engines.

As one of nearly 20 leading universities worldwide incorporating XNA Game Studio Express into their curricula, including Southern Methodist University's Guildhall and the University of Southern California's GamePipe, Microsoft announced additional support from DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington, a leader in the field of digital interactive entertainment education. Through its ProjectFUN software running on XNA Game Studio Express and summer workshops starting in 2007, DigiPen will bring Xbox 360 console game development for the first time ever to thousands of children ages 10 through 16.

"XNA Game Studio Express is an incredibly accessible tool for making games for Microsoft's game platforms and will provide our university students with modern tools and console development experience," said Claude Comair, founder and chairman of the board at DigiPen Institute of Technology. "And now with our ProjectFun for XNA Game Studio Express, we're eager to extend our educational offerings on Windows and Xbox 360 to include young children."

In conjunction with today's release of the XNA Game Studio Express beta, XNA partner GarageGames will begin enrollment for its Torque X beta program which can be accessed via http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna. Torque X includes both Torque Game Builder and a version of the Torque Shader Engine which have both been developed in conjunction with XNA Game Studio Express, allowing budding game developers to use drag and drop tools to easily create great games. The final version of Torque X will be released this holiday.

The final version of XNA Game Studio Express and the XNA Creators Club for building and distributing games on the Xbox 360 will launch simultaneously this holiday. XNA Game Studio Professional will be available in spring 2007.

Tags: XNA

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

K @ Aug 30th 2006 4:29PM

I hated that commercial.

Adam @ Aug 30th 2006 4:32PM

"We just have to finish level 3 and tighten up the graphics!"

FSK405K @ Aug 30th 2006 4:32PM

Pay $100 to make some crappy version of Pong? Pass.

Also, can't anyone download some of those other game-creating programs and skip the whole "my coding skills can't tax a 360 anyway?"

Hoffer @ Aug 30th 2006 4:38PM

Anyone can download and use XNA Express and build a game for free. If you want to play that game on your Xbox 360, you have to pay the $100/year. Otherwise, you can just play it on your PC.

ymmv @ Aug 30th 2006 4:38PM

@FSK405K

Programming Windows-games with XNA doesn't cost a cent, it's only when you want to share your games on Xbox Live you'll have to pay a fee.

sputnik @ Aug 30th 2006 4:47PM

This is a great idea. Truly innovative...I'm going to download it and give it a shot. I've been developing simple flash games...hope this gives me some cool new tools and is easier than Flash.

m3mnoch @ Aug 30th 2006 4:51PM

and, not only that, raise your hand if you know how much a wii or ps3 dev kit is.

no, this isn't for the 12 year-old to make a crappy version of pong for the 360. it's for the small game developers who actually are trying to make a go at it.

that's the beauty of pc software -- it just costs your time and knowledge to create something. now, small game developers can build games for the 360 for basically the same cost of developing a pc game.

sexy tools. distribution platform. static hardware. built-in audience.

yeah. this is a very, very good thing for small game developers.

m3mnoch.

Mojo @ Aug 30th 2006 5:00PM

I think that link needs to be:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/XNA

Grim @ Aug 30th 2006 5:10PM

This is going to be great. As a student learning Visual Basic in school, this will be a lot of fun to work with.

BklynKid @ Aug 30th 2006 5:12PM

Man that commercial pisses me off... because we all know designing a game is a job where "you get paid to play games!"

Dr.Swiss @ Aug 30th 2006 5:13PM

The only programming knowledge I know that's related to Microsoft/Windows is Visual Basic. I doubt that could be used for any of this stuff.

Bombsy @ Aug 30th 2006 5:20PM

Hm.

Even though a person in this beta would most likely have Visual Studio installed, it requires you to install visual c# express. Ah well.

Still, boo to extraneous software. And boo to not being able to use Visual Studio!

skain @ Aug 30th 2006 5:42PM

I think XNA when it is really released could be cool. But the current beta looks pretty lame. Notably no content pipeline (especially after the lengthy blog post about how much of a pain in the ass content management is without it) and a requirement to have VC#Express installed instead of normal VS2k5.

Think I'll wait for a more mature relase.

Faisal @ Aug 30th 2006 5:49PM

look at his hair...it's loooking FAAAAABULOOOUUUS!!!

PachuyiChomp @ Aug 30th 2006 5:54PM

I don't know why everyone is Whining VB is one of the easiest programming languages to learn period. C# isn't all that hard either.

It'd be great to recruit a few talented people over the web and develope some really fun games.

I for one will definatly download the kit just to try it out!

Have fun!

Brian Sexton @ Aug 30th 2006 6:17PM

I look forward to seeing what comes of this. It may be a month or two before I can dedicate much time to game development, but I definitely plan to have a go with the XNA kit and probably Torque X.

D-5 @ Aug 30th 2006 6:32PM

Yeah, VB is a little too simple for my tastes. Start learning C++ and C# if you expect to get the most out of this program. And yes, it isn't that hard to learn. Practice a little each day to become accustomed to the language.

otakucode @ Aug 30th 2006 7:11PM

ymmv: Wrong.

Clarification of Microsofts plans for everyone interested in XNA:
With the XNA Express released today, you can develop games for Windows and dream about the thing on your 360.
When you join the Creators Club, when it exists, for the price mentioned, you can run your game on your 360 *AND THATS IT*. You cannot share it over Xbox Live. You cannot sell it in the Arcade. If you wish to show your game to someone else, they must also be in the Creators Club and you have to send them the source code, the art, everything for your game. They then have to compile that code with XNA Express and deploy it to their own Xbox 360. They can then take your code and do whatever they want with it, so I'd only recommend sharing with those you trust if you want to retain control over your code.
In the future, I believe they've said spring 07 at the earliest, the ability to share your games via Xbox Live Community Arcade will be added. It will cost you $1000US per game to do this. Even if your game is free. You can also sell it for this price.
What cut of sales MS will offer to developers is unknown (if you think it's going to be ANYWHERE near the 60% 'major' publishers who bought a $25k devkit get, keep on dreaming).
Whether MS will insist on 'approving' titles even if you've got the $1000US is unknown. My guess is that they will.

All their talk about a "YouTube of gaming" is pure corporate BS. They are in no way interested in allowing amateur developers to share anything they want for free and let the community support it. If they come out with a decent revenue sharing plan for the developers who can lay out $1000US and their "portfolio management" BS board (which should be disbanded, but that is unlikely) let's through an extremely high quantity of submitted content, we might actually see some interesting games.

But my guess is that MS will keep the games as polished and corporate as possible. You won't be finding games like the stuff you find on YouTube, zany imaginative and creative mashups of ideas spawning viral memes. And they'll do everything to make sure we never see one of those viral content creators become a millionaire.

otakucode @ Aug 30th 2006 7:15PM

m3mnoch: I looked hard a week or so ago for the price on a PS3 devkit, but I couldn't find any numbers anywhere. The closest I found that even looked like reasonable speculation put it somewhere between $25k and $50k.

The Wii devkits, on the other hand, cost under $1800. Yes. Under $2000. I suspect we will see a bevy of independent studios (though probably not many amateurs) snapping those up. And plans for allowing 3rd parties to develop for the Virtual Console are still in the works. This next generation, it appears MS and Nintendo are both trying to get more developers involved but thus far everyone in the market is too spineless to really open their platform up as a true platform that amateurs can access.

Probot @ Aug 30th 2006 7:49PM

I haven't been following this too closely, but according to Greg Costikyan, this is basically MS charging people to make freeware.

http://www.costik.com/weblog/2006_08_01_blogchive.html#115630192989880482

On one level I can understand devs using this to promote their games, even if they can't make any money on them. On the other hand, there's really nothing stopping them from making the game and just releasing it commercially for PCs.

Like I said, I don't know much, but I thought I'd bring up that Costik link since he seems pretty opinionated on the subject.

sputnik @ Aug 30th 2006 7:57PM

#19 chill...of course they have to have some measure of quality control.

Evan @ Aug 30th 2006 8:32PM

It's more likely that creators will share effect demos than completed arcade games. Hopefully this will open the 360 to the demo scene, and encourage Americans to create demos the way Europeans do.

Evan @ Aug 30th 2006 8:48PM

Also, XNA is not a complete game engine. DirectX is relatively low level. For one or two guys with dreams of creating a game in their spare time, it would be more efficient to buy the Torque game engine.

otakucode @ Aug 30th 2006 8:50PM

sputnik: Of course? Have you been to YouTube? Ever seen the stuff that really goes viral on the net? What quality control filters do you really think they'd pass?

I wouldn't make an issue out of it if they didn't just keep pushing the phrase "The YouTube of gaming". You can't say "The YouTube of gaming" and then serve up "The ABC.com of gaming".

Moogle @ Aug 30th 2006 9:38PM

It seems like MS wants to be the Record Label of gaming - exploiting talent to feed their massive budget sinkhole.

This is what bothers me most, MS is doing everything possible to move as much of the developer's profit into their own pocket. Episodic content and purchasable addons? Sure, just pay MS for distribution and a percentage of profits! Make a indy game? Just pay MS!

While I like the ideas in principle, it seems they're primarily just going to hurt game studios that were already struggling to turn a profit on multimillion dollar franchises (and forget anything original like BG&E). No skin off MS's back tho, those studios will just cease to make games that play on other platforms either, so all gaming will be under MS's Live umbrella.

Yes, I'm being paranoid. It's a worst case scenario, but it sounds like MS's wet dream. It's not like MS is known for questionable business ethics, or hurting an industry for personal gain or anything.