Via ChurchCrunch, and several other sites covering this as well… B&H Publishing Group has released “Bible Navigator X”, a version of their Holman Christian Standard Bible that operates off an XBox 360. It’s purchaseable directly through XBox Live for $5 (or 400 Microsoft Points). I’m not going to go off onto “Why would you bother?” territory, though I’m not quite sure how this particular app is going to do much… but no one else commenting on this has noticed a crucial part of this.
Any of us could do this exact thing for $199 – and free if you just do a PC version.
Microsoft takes a lot of crap in a lot of areas for not being an innovator – and a lot of it is justified. But they were way out in front of everyone in one aspect. A couple of years ago, they began working on giving developers a means to build and sell games for the XBox 360 and Windows without the huge amounts of money and skill that it usually took to do so. They made this available in the form of XNA Studio, now on it’s third major release. This scaled-down version of the well-known Visual Studio IDE, used for software development, included some starter kits that could basically be run without modification. Of course, the fun part was either modifying one of these starter kits (and several more were available online), or writing your own stuff from scratch. And while it wasn’t click/drag easy to write something, it was still well within the means of an amateur programmer or three to write some pretty cool games. And it was REALLY cool to be able to play them on your 360!
See, none of the other big console manufacturers have given ‘indie’ game developers the ability to write games for their systems. To do so, you need to purchase a dev kit from them, which is essentially an unlocked version of the console that costs quite a bit more than a regular one. You also need to get your game approved by them before you could sell it, and if you want to do hard copies (i.e. sell at GameStop or Walmart) you need to find a publisher. And of course you needed to be able to write the game in the first place… and deal with a whole host of other issues. Essentially, the console market and it’s billions of dollars, was firmly controlled by a handful of people.
So now any one of us could write an XBox 360 game, and play it on our own machines, but could only give versions to other people with XBox 360s and XNA Studio installed on their computers to play. Then Microsoft revealed the big plans everyone was waiting on – letting you sell your game via XBox Live, the online multiplayer ‘experience’ that had also been used by some game publishers to sell add-on content. They set up what is now called XBox Live Indie Games, a site where you could post your game and sell it! Anyone with an XBox 360 could navigate to here through their system, and just like purchasing anything else via Microsoft Points, could buy your game – and you’d get 80% (I think) of the revenue with Microsoft keeping 20%. It hasn’t been going on that long, and the Indie Games setup is still in its infancy – they’re still sorting through issues like rating games so that the better ones don’t get swamped in the midst of a load of crap games (not unlike the iPhone’s App Store’s issues). But there’s been a few great games that have come up through Indie Games that would never have been released if it wasn’t for this.
So yay Microsoft, right? No, Bible Navigator X isn’t a game – but being sold through the Indie Games section indicates it was written with XNA Studio, and released through that same mechanism. So what’s the part that kicks butt?
First, games released via XNA Studio can be cross-compiled into versions for Windows, AND THE ZUNE. Yeah, you can use the same package, and likely a lot of your assets from your XBox 360 version, and make a mobile version too. Microsoft hasn’t set up their Zune App Store yet, but it’s coming very very soon, and it’ll probably work exactly the same way. I know Zune doesn’t have the iPhone’s market share, but if you can do a mobile version, a Windows desktop version, and an XBox 360 version without a ton of extra work, think of the possibilities – and why not take advantage of them?
Second, and the part I’m REALLY excited about, is that you have FULL ACCESS TO XBOX LIVE when you write an XBox 360 game. That means you can integrate GamerTags, and badges, and all that stuff, plus DO MULTIPLAYER VERSIONS OF BIBLE SOFTWARE! I can’t even begin to process all of what you could do, but think of the possibilities!!! You essentially have the entire infrastructure of an online gaming world to tap into; it’s crazy to think of what you could do with it. Anyone out there thought about this aspect of it yet? Developers, indie gamers???
(I should point out that the $199 I referenced is a yearly payment to MS to join their XNA Creators Club – this lets you connect your computer to your XBox 360, publish games to XBox Live, and get access to other resources. You don’t need this to do Windows stuff, and most Zune stuff, though.)