Last week at GDC '08 Microsoft announced that they're going to create a new distribution platform to distribute games developed on their XNA platform. This move should be more exciting to XNA (at least part time) developers like myself. Don't get me wrong the idea of being able to distribute a game a created over Xbox Live Marketplace would normally be something that you'd do a song and dance number. However, the quality of such games will need to be high in order for the gaming community to notice.
It won't be enough to have a couple of break away games, odds are they would have made it to the Xbox Live Arcade market place on there own. The community will need to sustain itself in order to be relevant which doesn't seem to be a part of Microsoft's strategy (yet). Now this can easily be fix by doing random promotions that constantly challenges to community to produce better games but only time will tell if that's in the books.
Though this should be big news for homebrew developers, this community platform has the potential to be huge for Microsoft gaming division. With integration with the Zune Microsoft has just sneeked itself into the mobile gaming market. The only problem with that is that Zune isn't exactly flying off the shelves and there by reduces the overall impact that this announcement could mean. In theory (this is coming from the my butt source) Microsoft could grow the Zune platform into a gaming platform that could compete with the Sony PSP and ideally Nintendo's DS hand helds. Right now the Zune won't win over the MP3 Player market since it seems that Apple's iPod line up appears to be a few step a head of them. However, it could be a good mobile gaming platform particularly for the casual gaming crowd. That's only one crazy theory; the real question is will anyone notice if it does?
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