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Interview with Microsoft's Chris Satchell
>> From eurogamer.net:
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Earlier this year, Microsoft announced plans to allow small independent developers - even individuals - to put homemade games on Xbox 360 using a new version of XNA Game Studio and the subscription-based XNA Creator's Club. The idea is simple: make a game with XNA, submit it to peer-review, release it on Xbox Live. At the time we were told that a beta test would go on behind the scenes in spring, with a full launch later in 2008.
* Eurogamer: What specifically will be part of the beta?
* Chris Satchell (XNA group general manager): Well, the beta will be closed - it's for people in the Creator's Club, so it won't be open to everyone on Xbox Live. It will be open to anybody that joins [the Creator's Club], but what we're really trying to test is the full end-to-end process. Can somebody create a game, can they upload it, rate their content, can the community review it. We're going to go through all those stages of build-submit-review-play and make sure that whole pipeline works smoothly, and then also find out how people actually use it.
As a normal consumer, this will go on under the covers, because you'd need to be in the Creator's Club to be able to use it, but if you're in the Creator's Club you'll be able to go to the websites and see what new games there are, get involved in the rankings, and rate the game against the content, and then also when you're on Xbox Live you'll be able to go to a page and see all the games that are coming through and play them all, and really experience what the community's doing.
* Eurogamer: The peer-review system seems like it has the potential to be used outside XNA. One of the things that's in the headlines a lot is Epic's problem of wanting to do modifications for Unreal Tournament 3. Is the peer-review system something that could be reused to allow modified content of that nature?
* Chris Satchell: There's two parts to that question. Let me address the first one. I think, assuming we're successful, I think the pipeline really is an incredible piece of innovation that will definitely enable other scenarios, and what's important about it is it's really addressing some of the problems with user-generated content.
I think we're seeing from some of the lawsuits out there - outside of our industry - that just saying you have reactive takedown isn't enough. You need to be more proactive about protecting people's IP and having content that's acceptable. So I think that's a major innovation. I absolutely believe that our pipeline, if successful, can help inform the design of those or even be used directly for other parts of our business.
Now the modding's a little different. Yes it could help rate mods, but the core issue of modding is what we talked about earlier - if you're not running in that sandbox, how do you guarantee security?
That's really where we've got stuck - making sure that nothing will hurt the user's system, and I'm a little disturbed when I think about other systems and people using what we call native code - code that goes right down to the metal - and then allowing people to run script mods on top of that without the right security measures. It could be really dangerous.
We've drawn a hard line because we very much care about security, and it seems like some other platforms don't seem to care quite as much. That kind of worries me for consumers. But all I can control is what we do on our platform, so that's where I'm going to focus - we're going to keep you safe because that's really important to us.
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Full Interview: eurogamer.net (2 pages)
Discuss this news item on our forums: forums.xbox-scene.com
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