Develop It Yourself

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A similar situation, creating distinct boundaries between homebrew and professional content, has existed for those developing Xbox 360 games—but it is something that Microsoft appears to be increasingly keen to change, taking the lead among the big three in its engagement with the indie development scene. Already offering both a means of distribution and affordable access to tools geared towards 360 development, Microsoft's intention is to add another tier to this scheme—one that will bridge the gap between professional and amateur, giving the homebrew community the same access to Xbox Live Arcade as professional developers.

Last year, Microsoft released XNA, a free-to-use software development kit for Xbox 360 and PC. A powerful sense of community spirit has already formed among XNA developers, exchanging information and helping one another, and thanks to the increasing support by third party products, like the Torque X 3D engine, Microsoft's indie nurturing strategy has already begun to yield impressive results.

"Everyone can create 360 games for the first time," says XNA veteran and lead programmer for exDream studios, Benjamin Nitschke. "Thanks to the XNA framework it is also much simpler to write Xbox 360 and PC cross-platform games than it was before. XNA covers a lot of cool tools like XACT for audio creation and co-operates nicely with existing tools to create graphic shaders. Thanks to the content pipeline it is also easy for beginners just to drag in some textures and 3D models and they get imported and converted to the best format automatically for you."

While you can't publish your creations straight to Xbox Live Arcade, XNA has its Creators Club, accessible with a subscription costing $99 (£49). The Creators Club then gives you unlimited access to the community's games and the ability to publish and promote your own non-commercial efforts within this reasonably restricted environment.

"It makes sense for the Xbox 360 team, which is obviously involved in the XNA development, but it is a bit of a hassle for the indie developer," says Nitschke. "The problem is that you can't share XNA games with your non-developer friends, since they won't have the club subscription. Even if they have it, you have to give them your whole source code and let them compile the games themselves. On the PC you can freely distribute and use XNA like the DirectX framework with no limitations, but on the Xbox 360 it is more or less just for yourself and the community."

Joseph B Hall, developer and author of a forthcoming book on XNA Game Studio Express, suggests why Microsoft might have initially taken such a route: "By restricting the production of XNA titles, Microsoft is protecting its partners' investments as well as ensuring that the quality of released titles meets some minimum standards, providing a better experience for the end user.

"Not just anyone can get their hands on the full commercial 360 development kit. It's reserved for established game development houses, whose ideas and final product must pass Microsoft's scrutiny and stringent quality control processes. Assuming that you meet the qualifications, and you get approval from Microsoft to purchase an official development kit, you'll be looking at spending around $10,000 (£4,900) for the privilege."

As you might expect, XNA's free-to-use toolset, Game Studio Express, is somewhat cut-back by comparison. Nitschke explains: "Since the framework is so new and there are limitations on the 360 side, you are currently not able to do any network code or access hardware like the DVD drive or soundcard yourself, which limits your possibilities."

XNA's other limitation is more technical in nature—currently, it only officially supports C#, a managed programming language. The significance of this lies in the trade-off between the language's accessibility and the speed at which it runs.