Survey time! Raise your hand if you’ve paid for an XNA created game in the Community Games section on NXE!
Anyone?…Anyone?…Bueller?…Yeah, that’s what I thought.
What started off as a great idea by Microsoft to let everyday gamer code monkeys create games available for download on the 360 has blossomed into a bunch of crappy titles that you wouldn’t be caught dead paying for and could easily find better alternatives to on one of the hundreds of free flash game websites. Read on for the XNA lowdown.
XNA was announced by Microsoft in March 2004 as an easy to use development platform that anyone with coding skills could use to create games compatible with Microsoft’s consoles. Unfortunately it took them until last December to get everything ironed out and ready for a public release. So for the last year anyone with a little ambition, a good idea, coding skills, and an extra 100 bucks could create games playable on the 360.
After submitting your brain child of a game to Microsoft, they would review it for bugs and then either reject it or agree to place it in their Community Games section on the 360 dashboard for the price of $2.50, $5 or $10 a pop, which Microsoft would then of course take 30% off the top of every purchase before giving you your share.
Not too shabby of a deal when you figure you only have to sell about 50 copies of your two-fiddy priced game to cover your expenses and everything above that is pure profit. Unfortunately for the all the developers out there, I’d be surprised if all of the XNA games combined have sold 50 copies. There’s just nothing good on there. Trust me, I was bored last night so I decided to torture myself by going through and playing all the demos in the most popular section. They all suck. Even the games that I could stand for more than a minute, there’s no way I would spend actual money to play more of it.
We live in a world where flash games are so prevalent and free that the idea of paying for one is laughable. Hopefully down the road we’ll see some great community created games hit the marketplace (i.e. DishWasher), but for now it’s a waste of time and money which is why XNA created games launching with a thud comes in at #66 on our list of Top 100 Gaming Moments of 2008.
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Dude, play colluesseum, its actually amazing!
I might try it out, but so help me if I go back into that awful Community Games section and the game sucks I’m coming after you.
They don’t all suck. The downside is no achievements.
So I branched out and decided to play a game with no graphics. And it played like you would expect a game with no graphics to play.
@Grantly: Presumably with no graphics at all, you can’t see anything on the screen.
I believe you are wrong but I also realise that this is YOUR opinion and you are entitled to say whatever the hell you want to. You might want to cheak out these titles.ARTOON – reminds me of Q bert.STARPILOT – alot like playing with the lightcycles from tron.WEAPON OF CHOICE – a fine example of an xna game done right.
i’ve come out of pocket for one XNA game, “Word Soup” and I actually enjoyed it a lot.
I picked up Hexothermic for 200 points and don’t regret it at all.