Microsoft have announced they'll be opening up Xbox 360 development via a new set of development tools, XNA Game Studio Express:

During his keynote presentation today at Gamefest 2006, a Microsoft(R) game developer event hosted by Microsoft in Seattle, Chris Satchell, general manager of the Game Developer Group at Microsoft, announced details of the new technology, which will be broadly available this holiday season. XNA Game Studio Express will be available for free to anyone with a Windows(R) XP-based PC and will provide them with Microsoft's next-generation platform for game development. By joining a "creators club" for an annual subscription fee of $99 (U.S.), users will be able to build, test and share their games on Xbox 360(TM) and access a wealth of materials to help speed the game development progress. This represents the first significant opportunity for novice developers to make a console game without a significant investment in resources.

The full press release has more information.

Pretty awesome news!@#!$

awesome, let's hope someone makes an app that can stream video to the 360 without using windows media center

Does this mean CS will be on xbox now?

Excellent news. Many of the homebrew guys and even smaller dev companies have been waiting for this.

Now to check out what languages/sdk/api etc... are supported. If I recall XNA was pretty much DX + C#.

Now if only the xbox 360 had a keyboard and mouse....

I'm really interested in what software comes out of all this, and what microsoft will let you do with that software re selling/marketing/distribution.

I was passing the news on to some game developers... when somebody from Seattle pointed out it was still 11pm on the 13th.

I know us Australians are from the future... but the guy is yet to make his keynote speech yet in the article it states:

"During his keynote presentation today at Gamefest 2006, a Microsoft(R) game developer event hosted by Microsoft in Seattle, Chris Satchell, general manager of the Game Developer Group at Microsoft, announced details of the new technology, which...."

Therefore... there is a little confusion as to the press release. I do imagine they pre-write their press releases but... it's a little bit of a mistake to talk about events before they happen.

Eeekk.... Sounds like somebody made a mistake heh.

I can sense a disruption in the space time continuum.

Hopefully the destruction is only limited to our own galaxy.

Okay here is some information for those who are interested. This all comes from various sources, so for clarity sake I won't post all the links etc.. unless somebody wants them badly or similar.

Here goes:

XNA Game Studio Express and the Framework are being released on the 30th in what is believed to be beta form.

The Game studio only supports C#, framework supports any .net supporting language (C++/VB etc..).

The $99us per year is meant for developers and anybody who wants to play the games created on the Xbox 360 (for now).

PC games created with the XNA game studio/framework are allowed to be released just like any other pc game using Visual Studio/Your IDE of choice (I'm not 100% on this as Visual Studio Express has some restrictions on releasing software).

It appears next year they will be having a sort of Xbox Creators Arcade or similar, where the devs submit their programs to MS to see if they can be released (they claim only for pirating/security reasons). This will make it so users don't have to pay the extra $99 as the devs have to.

Looks like a good effort in all, especially from MS. Hopefully this will lead to more devs having access to the Xbox 360 (think smaller companies trying to show off their game to a publisher), and not having to spend the thousands of dollars on a dev kit. I don't know how to take it being C# only, but Windows still being the dominate OS on PCs and you also get access to a console community it sure does look like a worthwhile reason to learn the language and Direct X.

I wonder how long until we see pong :D

Is it true that FarCry2 is ready, but MS paid to keep it for release with their new OS?

77% of People believe it is.

You mean crysis?

Greatly doubt it... they just released 2 new trailers the other week, doesn't look finished to me. Also they want to use DX10 rather then 9 for most of it. I'm sure we'll see a windows xp version, but chances are they will release both at the same time.

Business sense would make you think release both Versions when vista is released.

Also, how is this relevant to either the xna or xbox360?