The DNA of XNA

Last week Microsoft held an event at Warwick University to promote the launch of XNA Express, its easy access development platform for Windows and Xbox 360, aimed at academia and the amateur coding scene.

At the event, Chris Satchell, general manager of the Game Developer Group, spoke about his ambitions for XNA - in particular Microsoft's desire to foster a community that will share its home-made games through a YouTube-style content portal.

Legendary game designer Peter Molyneux - whose Lionhead studio was recently acquired by Microsoft - followed up by offering advice and encouragement to budding young coders.

GamesIndustry.biz caught up with them both afterwards to find out more about how XNA will change the development landscape. In part one of our interview, Satchell and Molyneux discuss the possibilities - and potential pitfalls - of opening up console development to all comers. Part two will be published tomorrow.

Chris Satchell: I think it's going to give it a really interesting differentiation point. What you're going to get is innovative ideas other people haven't seen, people getting involved in the platform in a different way that they can't on competing platforms, and new innovative content that you won't be able to get elsewhere.

They haven't invested in the tools to allow people to do it. I think it's really going to help differentiation, and give consumers a breadth of software - every experience from a simple two minute experience up to the big blockbuster games.

Do you think that there's any chance that we'll see XNA Express used as a professional, as well as amateur and academic, tool?

Peter Molyneux: I can certainly see it being used for prototyping. What we're doing more and more is little tiny prototypes, and the more that we can do them in a couple of days or a week, the better. The use of that technique is definitely going to spread.

The other area that's really interesting that XNA might be a catalyst for - and this is an airy-fairy dream of mine that I've had for ten or 20 years, and it's probably never going to be a reality - is for games to start talking to each other. It's just mad that games are complete islands unto themselves.

Wouldn't it be brilliant if I had Fable and in some ways it talked to Halo, and the game was slightly different because you'd finished Fable or vice versa? I think XNA, maybe because of modding and maybe because it's a way for us to talk in a common language, could be used for things like that. That's quite exciting.

Isn't there a chance that small developers, already struggling with ballooning development costs, are going to end up caught in the middle between bargain-basement amateur development on XNA and the established, big-budget studios?

Peter Molyneux: I think there's a new model developing now. I know people from Lionhead who've set up successful companies - like Mark Healey of Rag Doll Kung Fu, with Media Molecule - who, because they haven't got designs on making a triple-A game, are actually making money. I think those people exist today, they're just a little less public than the big developers.

I'll give you a great example - a chap called Scawen Roberts who did a game called Live For Speed. He was a programmer at Lionhead. One day he literally stood up from his chair and said, âI want to do a driving game. Lionhead isn't going to do one and I want to do one.' And he went out and wrote his own driving game.

He's now sponsored by BMW, he's paid off his mortgage, he's got a very, very comfortable living and his game sells very regularly. He's under the radar for the moment, but he's not an amateur by any means.

The interesting thing for smaller developers is what he does next: whether or not he then wants to become a triple-A developer, or whether he wants to continue being small.

So I think there is an amateur scene - which is the equivalent of someone with a handheld camera going up to their auntie and saying tell me something interesting, and is never going to be anything more than that - and then there are those passionate people who have a dream. They're a bit more like the arthouse in the movie industry.

Chris, in your lecture you predicted that games developers' priorities are going to change, from performance to productivity. What leads you to believe that's going to happen?

Chris Satchell: Let's say the next generation of hardware is more complex again. What's going to be more important? Being able to utilise all aspects of it to 80 per cent or some aspects to 100 per cent?

Multi-core programming is the way of the future. We're just at the bounds of frequency-based performance. Is it going to be important to use every cycle on a single core? No, that's not going to be that important to you, even if you care about performance. What you're going to care about is how much of the system you can use, and I think that systems like XNA, managed code, C# help you do that a lot more.

Then because of the capacity of these systems, what's going to make a bigger difference is not whether you get every cycle from the machine, but how early your content creators got productive. How many months did they spend wasting time because you were building your engine when they could have been polishing content? That's what will really make a difference to people.

You've spoken about your ambitions for a YouTube-style public platform for user-created games. Would IP ownership for the content put up on such a platform rest solely with the creators? You also mentioned royalties - how would that work?

Chris Satchell: There's a lot of policy, and a lot of stuff to work out. But conceptually, if you do something with XNA Game Studio Express, you would own your IP. There's probably some sort of licensing agreement to allow us to put it up and allow people to download it that you would have to do when you submit it, just like a professional developer would. Probably simpler, but similar.

Then the next stage after that is, if that community is monetised in some way, how to start flowing some of that money back to the people that are making it successful. But conceptually, yeah, people should own their IP irrespective of the fact that we provide a distribution channel.

And how about censorship of that content?

Chris Satchell: From my perspective I'd like to have it as open as possible, but we have to understand that there are a couple of areas where society does put bans on things. There is an idea of common decency. Our games only go a certain distance, 18-rated films only go a certain distance, and there are things that are considered inappropriate up to that point.

But I want every idea out there that we can get. If people want to criticise Microsoft, to make fun of me, Bill Gates, J Allard, whoever, that's no problem, If someone decides to do a game that's just blatant pornography, that's probably going to be an issue.

Similarly on the IP side - if somebody's blatantly ripping off other people's IP rights, we have to respect IP rights. Really what it comes down to is that we need strong ways for the community to be able to identify content that's inappropriate, for IP holders to identify content that infringes their IP. And then be able to revoke that content.

Outside of that, I think there should be as little censorship as possible.