Make your own damn video game

[His Frogness]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/fun.games/08/14/microsoft.game.software.ap/index.html

http://news.com.com/Play+your+own+Xbox+game/2100-1043_3-6104939.html?tag=nl

At first I got deadly chills thinking about how I would soon be out of a job...fired because four 12 year-olds can make a better game than the pros. But as I pondered things more I came to think that this could actually be a big boon to games.

[Sean Beeson]

This is going to be a very interesting period :p

I have seen so many 12 year olds make videos of them blowing stuff up, maybe we can expect to see some interesting games.

[spinkitten]

would be interesting to see how games developers react to this - Valve has already sold the rights to the Source engine to the Red Orchestra mod team, who can now sell their mod on Steam. The Unreal engine seems pretty hot these days, not to mention the CryEngine 2 - could provide a healthy back-channel of revenue for the developers to provide the rights to their engine at a designated cut, with Microsoft distributing it across Live, again taking a cut. It would certainly focus mod-teams attempts, most fizzle out through boredom, lack of drive - a potential financial reward of some form at the end would bolster the ranks, i'd imagine.

Saying that, didn't Sony attempt this with the PS2 Net Yaroze? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze

[His Frogness]

Saying that, didn't Sony attempt this with the PS2 Net Yaroze? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze

WOW!! I had never even heard of that before. I wonder if any big titles came out of it.

It's a good idea, especially in this marketing-driven industry. This costs MS hardly anything, and the fact that most of these games are only available to other "club" members will weed out the turds. Some really innovative game designs could be the result. It's not hard to imagine the big developers ripping off all the original ideas that spawn from all these homebrew games.

[DJDM]

This should be very cool. I can't wait to check out the totally random games that are going to come out of this.

[spinkitten]

judging by the Half-Life 2/Source Engine mod community - it'll be over-run with zombie and cyberpunk shooters in next to no time! :)