Video game industry opens its doors to upstart developersThis supports the trend of video game platforms going open source and user generated, about 2 years behind the Internet trend. So expect all the social media habits identified and exploited by YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Digg, etc. to weave their way into the video game industry.
The video game industry is welcoming upstart developers whose titles may lack polish but have style, quirkiness, humor.
News from the recent Game Developers Conference:
Microsoft's XBox to Adopt Player-Developed GamesJust another reason why it continues to kick Hollywood's anti-consumer on-the-same-path-as-the-record-company ass.
Microsoft Corp. said it will make Xbox 360 videogames developed by players available for download through the console's online service. The new service will double the size of the Xbox 360 game library to 1,000 games within a year of its launch, scheduled for this holiday season
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Nintendo, Microsoft Bow Indie Games Services
Microsoft Corp and Nintendo Co Ltd unveiled on Wednesday new online services or their video game consoles to showcase games by independent developers, part of a push by the companies to tap enthusiasm for so-called casual games.
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Microsoft to Democratize Gaming Via Community
In a frenetic keynote address at the Game Developers Conference here, Microsoft showed off the next phase of a strategy it claims will "democratize" game development and distribution. For several years, Microsoft has been working on its XNA Studio, a platform that allows anyone to create games for the Xbox and for Windows.
But now, the company is expanding the XNA offering to allow the best community-created games to be uploaded to and distributed from Xbox Live. Microsoft is calling the new offering its "Creators Club," and the idea is to present the Xbox Live and XNA communities with a way to create games using the XNA tools, submit them for peer review, and then put the best of them up on Xbox Live.
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Wii Fit, Other Innovations Unveiled
In another move, Nintendo will launch a new online service in the U.S. on May 12 called WiiWare that will allow game publishers to distribute new titles over the Internet directly to users instead of on discs. For games distributed over WiiWare, game makers won't need any approval from Nintendo, though they must get their games rated by an industry rating system.
UPDATE 12/08 = most of these links are expired. Here's more info on Nintendo's WiiWare initiative from Wired Magazine. Xbox's independent game developer community (XNA Studios) is now live. A more recent Wall Street Journal article that doesn't require a subscription to view (at least for now).
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1 comment:
I hope this comes to fruition, sooner than later. Frankly, I'm getting tired of playing scrabulous.
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