In the media’s onslaught of Microsoft coverage following the disappearance of Grand Poobah Bill Gates from day-to-day operations, MSNBC published a hits and misses list of Microsoft products over the years. It includes the Xbox as a “hit,” though it notes that Nintendo’s Wii has been the runaway console sensation in the last couple of years and that the Xbox has suffered from some technical glitches that might have pushed late adopters over to Playstation3. Overall though, it has been a decent investment on their part, the author concludes.
Retrospectives on success and failure are easy, Ms. Choney, MSNBC Contributor. Predictions are far riskier. So I’ll take the braver course and say, Choney, you missed one. People are going to look back and say that this was the time that Microsoft, once the bane of geeks everywhere, recharted the game development universe and became the gamer’s hero.
I know, it makes me want to laugh too, but the truth is, Microsoft has been making inroads for independent developers for years while Nintendo and Sony have been snoozing and, with their XNA Creators Club, they’ve done something that no one else has ever done. They have made console development finally available to the little guy (and gal).
For the last few years, we’ve been seeing a casual game surge in PC gaming and real growth for independent developers, but if you want to play games on whatever god’s — Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo — altar you worship, you’re still probably buying fifty or sixty dollar disks at a store and plugging them in your console at home. When was the last time you played a game on your PC that came on a disk? (Me: college, about ten years ago)
Microsoft, capitalist Mecca that it is, realized back on the Xbox that they were missing out on a significant source of income. Though Sega, with its spectacular but ill-timed Dreamcast console, tried to take advantage of the online gaming surge by shipping with a dial-up modem, Microsoft was the first successful console maker to put a broadband internet connection at the forefront of its machine.
Xbox LIVE, Microsoft’s online service, was originally intended as a way for gamers to play together across consoles, much like the kind of multi-player games that had been on PCs for years. While it seems like an obvious gaming advancement now, neither Sony nor Nintendo had plans for anything like it at the time. In 2004, Microsoft made what seems like now the next obvious leap: it launched Xbox LIVE Arcade, a downloadable game service with the potential to appeal to all those PC casual gamers, offering low-price games that download directly to your Xbox.
“So what?” we might say now. Both Sony and Nintendo, late-adopters maybe but not too late, have already followed up, providing their own online services. They’re all the same now, right?
Listen up, my grrl gamer friends, those of you who probably inked your own Legend of Zelda dungeons in your pink Ralph Macchio notebooks back in the 80’s: you, too, can make a game for your Xbox. All you have to have is an XNA Creators Club membership, an Xbox 360 console, and some free software downloadable to your PC.
Why has this never happened before? A refresher course in gaming history says this: console development is really expensive.
One of those typical graphics extravaganzas can cost millions of dollars to create (try asking your parents for that kind of loan). A significant portion of those costs goes into production, distribution and marketing of the game disk. For years, developers have relied on publishers to fund their projects for this very reason.
If you don’t have to make a game disk — if you can publish directly to a console for download — those costs are eliminated. With the advent of Xbox LIVE Arcade, indie companies could now fund their own projects. It might cost only a few hundred thousand dollars, instead of millions.
Ok, so a couple hundred thousand dollars is much less than a few million, but still out of reach for our dungeon-sketching, Ralph Macchio-loving lone grrl gamer. She can make a PC game using a software package like Visual Studio. Why can’t she do the same for consoles?
Because, until now, console development has required a Hardware Development Kit (HDK) that costs roughly the same amount as a new BMW.
In order to test a game for glitches, it needs to be run on the hardware it’s designed for. This is easy for PC’s — the machine you’re creating the game on is the same one you’ll test it for — but much harder for consoles. Vastly simplified, game creation and testing requires hardware with debugging capabilities, so you can actually figure out what’s causing those glitches and crashes in your game. Console makers created HDKs (versions of their consoles that can debug) for developers to test on. Unfortunately, they cost a ridiculous amount of money and in order to own one, you have to be approved by either Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony. So even if you’re Bill Gates and you could manage to pony up the tens of thousands of dollars to own one, chances are the company wouldn’t send one to you anyway (okay, Gates probably has one, but I bet Warren Buffet doesn’t).
So while you can make Bejeweled: The Bloodbath Levels on your PC, getting it on your Xbox is a much more difficult prospect.
This has been a lot of background and a lot of work to come down to what is, really, a very simple idea. It costs Microsoft almost nothing to make a game available on Xbox LIVE and it knows there are potentially millions of individual developers who want their game on there. If only our star-crossed lovers could meet somewhere in the middle…
Hello, Larry. Why did no one think of this before?
For $99 annually (or $49 for four months), you can join XNA Creators Club, a group of game developers that have the potential to see their games on Xbox LIVE Community Games, part of the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. You can develop for Community Games with use of a downloadable software package (XNA Game Studio along with an express version of Visual Studio, a code complier for Windows products) which is free whether or not you join Creators Club and your own Xbox 360 for debugging. Although there is still programming and art creation involved in making a game, Microsoft is on that, too. They have a number of partners to make game development easier with companies like GarageGames who make Torque, a popular 3D game engine, and Softimage for 3D modeling and animation software, providing free versions of their products to Creators Club members. It’s likely only a matter of time before Microsoft adds full-on game creation tools for non-programmers.
There’s only one hitch: Creators Club members vote on which games make it to Xbox LIVE and which don’t. This may seem like a real obstacle, but consider this: for the first time in console history, the people deciding whether or not your game gets published have no financial stake in the matter. Previously, games didn’t even go into development without a publisher’s approval of monetary backing and publishers are inherently adverse to innovative gameplay. They want something that looks like last year’s hit, so they know their investment will pay off. Even with the surge in PC casual gaming, with many more indie developers putting out games, developers had to find interested internet portals who would host their download. Portals are money-makers, too. If they aren’t attracting wide swaths of gamers there, their advertising doesn’t pay off, and so they’re more likely to tamp down innovation, too. You can be brave and put your download on a major portal, but the internet is a big place — how likely are people to find it?
There have always been gatekeepers to game publication and until now, they have always cared more about how profitable your game was than how innovative or fun.
XNA Creators Club is full of gamers just like you. They are gatekeepers of a more benign sort. Your game will not make them money and so they are unlikely to care about anything other than whether it’s a fun game or not (and whether it conforms to Microsoft’s stated standards). If anything, they are also hoping that you will review their game and approve its publication. Everybody wins.
Especially us. For years, the game industry has essentially ignored women. We’ve been underrepresented in their ranks. We’ve been actively dissed as players and regarded as an unreliable demographic. Console makers in particular are guilty of focusing on a young male market, figuring women didn’t buy consoles, women didn’t play games. This is the first real chance for women to become a direct force in console game development.
As grrl gamers, we have our own list of “hits and misses” when it comes to game development. Unfortunately, the “misses” category is pretty staggering, while “hits” have been much slower and harder to come by. Microsoft, surprisingly, is the first real console maker to offer us the next big break in game development (Hey, Wii Fit is cool, but don’t get me started if that’s all that constitutes “marketing to women” in consoles these days). We’d be fools not to make this the biggest hit for women gamers since Samus Aran took off her helmet.
Site Administrator
tekanji