Microsoft Opens Up XNA, Introduces XNA Game Studio Express

August 14, 2006 | By: James Brightman

| More

Could the days of 4-5 guys making games in a basement or garage be making a comeback? Microsoft certainly hopes so. At its Gamefest conference today MS announced that it's making its XNA tools available to all. Several universities have also partnered with MS to include XNA in their curriculum. We speak with Microsoft's Scott Henson and Dave Mitchell to see what this really means for game development.

Today at the Microsoft Gamefest conference, being held at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, Microsoft is set to announce that it is opening up the XNA framework to aspiring Windows and Xbox 360 developers everywhere. The software giant has also partnered with 10 universities, such as University of Southern California, SMU Guildhall, Georgia Tech University and others, who will include the new XNA Game Studio Express into their curriculum starting as early as this fall.

"Great game ideas are incubating in the minds of students everywhere," said Michael Zyda, director for Gamepipe Labs at the University of Southern California. "With XNA Game Studio Express, Microsoft is investing in these next-generation innovators, creating the canvas for dreamers to express their powerful game ideas. In incorporating XNA Game Studio Express and Xbox 360 consoles into our Gamepipe program, USC will be able to better provide game studios and publishers around the world with a newfound wellspring of talent and opportunity. It's ingenious."

A beta version of the software will be made available on August 30, freely available on Windows, and the final product will be released during the holiday season. Microsoft is hoping that by opening up XNA the game development scene will get new life breathed into it. "XNA Game Studio Express will open game development to new audiences by providing an inexpensive, easy-to-use cross-platform toolset for everyone from the hobbyist, indie developer and enthusiast to game development studios. With the introduction of this new tool, Microsoft is inviting everyone to create their own Xbox 360 console games for the first time in history," the company said.

"XNA Game Studio Express will ignite innovation and accelerate prototyping, forever changing the way games are developed," said the general manager of the Game Developer Group at Microsoft, Chris Satchell, who is presenting a keynote at Gamefest. "By unlocking retail Xbox 360 consoles for community-created games, we are ushering in a new era of cross-platform games based on the XNA platform. We are looking forward to the day when all the resulting talent-sharing and creativity transforms into a thriving community of user-created games on Xbox 360."

And because XNA is a cross-platform toolset, hobbyists, students, indie developers and studios alike will have the ability to create an Xbox 360 and Windows title simultaneously if they wish. In addition, Microsoft has announced that certain studios will begin implementing the tools into their current offerings. In fact, GarageGames, creators of Xbox Live Arcade title Marble Blast Ultra, have already migrated their Torque toolset over to XNA Game Studio Express.

"The GarageGames mission has always been to provide top-tier technology, tools and community to independent and aspiring game developers," said Josh Williams, CEO of GarageGames. "We are excited that Microsoft is demonstrating leadership by taking the revolutionary step of opening up game development for Xbox 360 to hobbyists and students. In aligning our tools and technology with XNA Game Studio Express, we're helping even more individuals with the creativity and drive to make video games bring them to life on both Windows XP and Xbox 360."

To find out more about why Microsoft has decided to make XNA so widely available, and what the company hopes to achieve by doing so, GameDaily BIZ spoke with Scott Henson, Director of Platform Strategy, and Dave Mitchell, Director of Marketing, both from the Microsoft Game Developer Group.

"We believe we have some fundamental issues that we need to address," said Henson. "The three fundamental issues that we're wrestling with really are around the retention of the folks in the industry, the pipeline of the folks in the industry, and just the 'sequelitis' and the development of games in the industry."

"What we're seeing is 18-36 month dev cycles on multi-hundred person teams can task the best of individuals. When it takes you 6-12 months to see if a game is actually a game, on the front-end, and 6-12 months on the backend to just ship the game, you're putting in a tremendous amount of effort and a lot of money and time to find out whether you've got a game or not that may or may not be successful in the marketplace. And that becomes an unsustainable thing and wears people out and we're losing far too many people from the industry as a result of that... And it also makes it difficult for people to try things outside of their immediate domain [because] they have to focus so much on the Herculean task of shipping the game."

Henson also noted that not only have some people in the industry been driven out by the pressures of development, but that the game industry's pipeline would appear to be dwindling. "We've reached out to universities and certainly the universities have reached out to us and said, 'Hey we'd love to participate in development,' and far too often we've had to tell them no. And it's unfortunate because the year-over-year involvement and the excitement around computer science is declining," he explained. "We've been told the involvement is down more than 30% and that bodes horribly for our industry and also very poorly for the tech sector at large... If the apathy continues and the year-over-year decline continues we're going to have a serious problem not only at the university level but all the way down academia at large... That pipeline coming in is something that we're deeply concerned about."