After being in beta for a couple months, Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express has now been released as version 1.0.

The XNA team is proud to announce the availability of the 1.0 release of XNA Game Studio Express and the XNA Framework, aimed at helping students and hobbyists build games for Windows and the Xbox 360. This release supports both Windows game development and Xbox 360 development (subscription to the XNA Creators Club is required in order to run XNA-based games on the Xbox 360)

Their Games Technologies Center has some more information.

Way cool! It will be interesting to see if Nintendo or Sony follow suit with development tools of their own. A freely downloadable SDK for Wii games sure would be interesting.

can't see your average hobbiest being about to program movements and s*** for a wii game...

Microsoft is going to run a game dev competition, winner will have the game published on the XBox Live Arcade website... or so the rumors go...

Here is where the info will be

Hopefully this gets rid of the excuse that people want to be able to run "homebrew" on their consoles.

I wonder how competitive the DirectX and XNA guys are going to get. As I understand it, it's already a bit like the whole Apple II/Lisa compettive days within Apple.

I went to a talk on XNA last week at QUT and the guys there were stating that XNA does not really compete with DirectX or more importantly Managed DIrectX (The other .Net conversion) and after looking at what XNA has I agree.

It is a really simplified set of classes wrapping up a lot of the overhead of DirectX but is too simple to produce a really power hungry game IMHO. Altho i expect to be proven wrong ;)

.Net itself does not lend itself to steller performance and XNA is another layer on top of Managed DirectX which sits on top of DirectX which sits on top of Graphics Drivers which of course slows down the rendering pipeline. Altho ui suspect that this would all be highly optimised when playing on the XBox 360 Console and better performance would be a given.

The guy even stated the "Hard Core" game developers will stick with C++ and DirectX to get the most out of the console.

Even so it is damn easy to use, and the community is growing fast.

One thing to remember is that you can't freely distribute your game as a stand alone copy... You have to distribute the full source code and have your friends install Visual Studio Express and the XNA frame work onto there own PC then have them compile the code and run it via Visual Studio. So if you want to keep your code and art assets to yourself you won't be releasing anything using this development platform.

can't see your average hobbiest being about to program movements and s*** for a wii game...

you grossly underestimate the homebrew and game dev community