Huge XNA News at GDC '08

The XNA team made two very big announcements at the Game Developers' Conference. 

Cutting right to the chase, the biggest news is that the wait will be over for community XNA games on Xbox LIVE!  Coming this holiday season, people will be able to share, peer review, and play user-created games!

From the announcement on the XNA Team Blog:

The Xbox LIVE community games brings to life the community-driven gaming vision we have talked about in the past. This offering gives the opportunity to share, peer review, download and play games created by the community, for the community. Starting with the beta launch of the service later this Spring, XNA Creators Club subscribers will be able to submit their own game creations for self-publishing through to Xbox LIVE Marketplace.

Read the post for the full details, and here for more, but another important note is that yes, this will lead to the ability to make money by writing XNA games for XBOX Live (details still to come)!

The second announcement is of one of the first new features coming with Game Studio v3.0 - the ability to create games for the Zune!

[...] This will let you write one game and deploy it to all three platforms that XNA Game Studio 3.0 will support: the Xbox 360, Windows, and now the Zune. [...] That means that XNA Game Studio 3.0 integration includes discoverability/access to the user's music - allowing the user to customize background soundtracks or create real-time visualizations at their discretion.

In addition, the XNA Community Games Platform team has announced the ability to have multiple Zunes wirelessly engage in an ad-hoc gaming experience (think of the possibilities!)

Boston XNA Developers Group

Now, what better place to discuss these announcements than at the new Boston XNA Developers Group? The first meeting is on Wednesday of next week, February 27th at 6:00 in the Waltham Microsoft office. No game development experience required.

Details are on the Boston XNA Developers Group site.

See you there!

-Chris