Xbox Content Creators Club: A Great Way for Beginners to Start Game Development
Matt posted in Xbox 360, Getting into Games on August 21st, 2006

It’s no secret that a lot of console developers look down on PC game developers. PC games have frequent patches (although to be fair, Xbox 360 games have seen their share of patches too), large quantities of memory to waste (especially with virtual memory paging out anything that you might have leaked), and are designed for $3000 hardware. PC game developers have plenty of hardships that console game developers don’t face. Supporting a wide range of hardware is quite difficult. They have to make a game that can work with hundreds of video cards and drivers each with varying capabilities and performance. Making a game look good with infinite combinations of target hardware is always a challenge, let alone designing a game engine for hardware that will be out two (or in Valve’s case 5) years from now.

Microsoft has offered a great solution to this. Although Sony pioneered the idea of user created games for their systems with the Net Yaroze (a special development Playstation 1) and the Playstation Linux Dev Kit (a special linux distribution for Playstation 2 that would allow development), Microsoft is taking it a step further since you can do it on a regular Xbox 360 without any difficult setup. Although it seems a bit expensive ($99 a year), hopefully the price will come down quickly, and ideally, they’d offer it for free. Now, it should be easy for anyone interested to get console experience that developers expect. No longer will amateur game developers have to worry about designing a game that works on all sorts of different video cards with different features. They can make a game that works on one target hardware configuration and focus on squeezing every ounce of performance out of it.

The beta version of XNA Game Studio Express (the development tool used to make games for the 360) isn’t out yet, so I can’t comment on the API, but Managed DirectX simplified DirectX development somewhat. No longer will developers have to check a multitude of HRESULTS to figure out what was wrong. Exception handling greatly simplifies handling all the error cases, but let’s hope they improve the API to take advantage of the string in the exception, so you won’t spend hours trying to figure out which parameter was incorrect when you get an invalid call exception. (If you haven’t done Direct X programming, oftentimes a bad function parameter will return an HRESULT that corresponds to invalid call. That’s all the information you get, so it’s tough to debug.) Console development with a learning curve that’s potentially less steep then PC game development (since you no longer have to check the capabilities of the system and come up with a backup plan) will hopefully make it easier for amateur game developers to express themselves creatively without getting hung up on the technically challenging aspects of game creation.

Another good aspect of the Content Creators Club is that publishers might be interested in commercially publishing the best games. Sure, you could create a freeware game and hope that someone is interested in making a commercial version of it like Every Extend Extra, or you could try and earn revenue by making it shareware, but with both of those avenues, it’s going to be difficult to stand out from the huge numbers of freeware/shareware PC games out there. With the Content Creators  Club, they’ll be one place to check all the games available, and I imagine that Microsoft will rate them by popularity. Also, Xbox Live Arcade is a much better way to sell an indie game than on the PC because the attach rate is very high, and you don’t have to worry about piracy. Microsoft has made it easy so that people without credit cards can buy marketplace points at their favorite game stores.

All in all, the Content Creators Club is a very exciting opportunity for everyone who is not already professionally developing games. It even may work well for professional game developers trying to put together a demo to pitch to publishers. Hopefully, Microsoft will lower the price to reduce the cost of entry and streamline the API, so it’s even easier for people without a lot of experience to start making games!