Ever had the urge to create your own game? Then you’ll have realised its extremely hard to, especially for consoles. Microsoft are trying to change that by making a brand new tool for the market. The program is called ‘XNA Game Studio Express‘ and is free to download for the PC. For an annual subscription of £65, you can port your games to the Xbox 360 and play them on your TV. Microsoft are also planning to setup a service to let you share and/or sell these games to others.

“It is about sharing games and is envisioned as a YouTube for games,” said Andrew Sithers, the academic lead at Microsoft UK.

This is great news for amateur developers and could help Microsoft by padding out their Xbox Live Arcade with innovative user-generated games. Its also a good sign for the industry as at the moment, taking risks is damaging as it costs so much to develop games. Hopefully with this tool we will start to see a lot more interesting and creative games coming out as developers don’t have to worry so much about the cost of production.

Source: Major Nelson’s Blog
Quote: BBC News