XNA Game Studio Express Released

Xbox 360

The final version of Microsoft's free XNA Game Studio Express has just been launched, which allows anybody to develop their own Xbox 360 games.

You can download XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 and the XNA Framework for Windows at Microsoft's site. The XNA Framework allows developers to distribute their games on the PC to any Windows machine, as a stand-alone product. The same game can also be deployed to the Xbox 360 without changes. Pretty nifty.

To be able to play any XNA games on your Xbox 360, you'll have to join the XNA Creators Club, which costs $99USD a year (about $130AUD). To do this, you can jump across now to the Xbox Live Marketplace on your 360, select games, all games, and then XNA Creators Club to purchase a subscription. To play games on your 360, you'll need to also download the XNA Game Launcher, which downloads the game-code from your PC.

They've also announced a new competition which will be open in January, which allows budding XNA developers a chance to have their game published over Xbox Live Arcade - Dream-Build-Play

Sliced Comments: Hopefully later on they'll allow a more open access to XNA developed games without having to have purchase a subscription. That would really open up the 360.