Why make a small Flash game when you can make a small Xbox306 one ?
One of the coolest thing about Flash is the fact that it made everyone a potential game maker. Games, as you might (not) agree, are the main force that power computers. Beside from the fact that games are pushing the hardware industry to it’s limits on a daily basis, all of these fancy applications we’re using are just by-products of geeks playing. From the moment you first played the arcade or held a console controller, if you are a true geek or a passionate gamer, you knew that it’ll be awesome to make your own games. Sadly, in the past, to create even the simplest or stupidest game, one would have to grasp complex programming and math. Flash substantially lowered the entry point for creating games, and also completely revolutionized the way we interact with small and very-small games. The term “Flash Games” has become so familiar and recognized that people sometimes reffer to all small games as Flash-Games, even if it’s a small desktop casual game that has nothing to do with Flash. Many of today computer users won’t finish their day without playing some Flash game they got by email or stumbled upon while surfing the web.
This game making enthusiasm is what Microsoft want to capture and use in it’s Xbox360. With the release of XNA Game Studio Express, MS wants to lower the entry point for the Xbox360 game maker. It was possible to create your own Xbox games before, but it was much harder and was lake of the community aspect. The XNA is a free set of developer tools for creating Xbox360 games that will be published through the Xbox Live service. This free tool is a subset from the professional tools for Xbox360 game developers but will be suffice for the amateur to indie game developer. This indeed sounds like a very cool and welcome initiative from Microsoft.
Read more about it: here, here and here.
IMHO MS should include the Flash player in it’s Xbox360, that way it can take advantage of the tons of already deployed Flash homebrew games that are out there. This likely not gonna happen, Flash and MS has become somewhat of an enemies since MS has it’s own pov of what the next Flash or the next rich-media-platform should be, and that’s her WPF/Sparkle. And what about Sparkle, can we make games with it ?. Only time will tell if it’ll be as approachable as Flash for the ++amateur game maker. What I’m sure of is this, when such a term as WPF-Games or Sparkle-Games will be as familiar as the term Flash-Games then we’ll know that Microsoft has made it.
It’s all about the games !.
BTW it’s possible to run Flash games on the Xbox360 with some limitation.