Chris Satchell, Aaron Greenberg and John Schappert of Microsoft gave bloggers a chance to throw out some questions to them at a breakfast gathering this morning. Here's a breakdown of what they had to say:
XNA Community Program
* Games are all unrated. No ESRB intervention
* There may be a possible file size increase in the future to accommodate game developers.
* Games probably won't be restricted by region.
* Game creators will retain all rights to their games.
* There will be no certification for XNA community developed games.
* No achievements for XNA community games
* Friends lists probably won't work on XNA community games. They are still working on it.
Xbox Live Downtime Over The Holidays
* Xbox Live outage due to overwhelming holiday response
* 1,000,000 concurrent users on before Super Bowl playing Madden
* 4,000,000 new Live Gold subscribers in 6 months
Xbox 360 Blu-Ray Player Possibilities
* Microsoft doesn't care about Blu-Ray at this time
* 3% attach rate for HD-DVD add-on
Red Ring Of Death Still An Issue?
* Failure rate has officially dropped
* Microsoft is working on the DRM issue with downloaded content
* DRM issue only affects those who don't have access to Live
* In the interim, Microsoft will refund ALL your MS Points to re-download your content
It's nice to see that they are working on the DRM issue; it hasn't affected me or anyone I know, but I've read up on the issue and it seems like a real serious problem for affected users.
The XNA community seems to be Microsoft's first steps to into allowing user-generated content into games. I've talked about Sony implementing this feature on Unreal Tournament 3 for the PS3, and I would love to see similar features implemented on the Xbox. If all goes well with the XNA community, we may see some big leaps in user-generated content. They may seem fairly crippled compared to what we've come to expect, but if it goes over well we could see some very interesting things coming from Microsoft in terms of user customization and content.
Most of us knew about the issues concerning the holiday outage of Live, but it is nice to see some exact numbers; Live is a force to be reckoned with. As for HD-DVD, it's a good thing there wasn't a high attatchment rate. It's also kind of funny to see Microsoft dragging their feet on the subject of switching to Blu-Ray.
XNA Community Program
* Games are all unrated. No ESRB intervention
* There may be a possible file size increase in the future to accommodate game developers.
* Games probably won't be restricted by region.
* Game creators will retain all rights to their games.
* There will be no certification for XNA community developed games.
* No achievements for XNA community games
* Friends lists probably won't work on XNA community games. They are still working on it.
Xbox Live Downtime Over The Holidays
* Xbox Live outage due to overwhelming holiday response
* 1,000,000 concurrent users on before Super Bowl playing Madden
* 4,000,000 new Live Gold subscribers in 6 months
Xbox 360 Blu-Ray Player Possibilities
* Microsoft doesn't care about Blu-Ray at this time
* 3% attach rate for HD-DVD add-on
Red Ring Of Death Still An Issue?
* Failure rate has officially dropped
* Microsoft is working on the DRM issue with downloaded content
* DRM issue only affects those who don't have access to Live
* In the interim, Microsoft will refund ALL your MS Points to re-download your content
It's nice to see that they are working on the DRM issue; it hasn't affected me or anyone I know, but I've read up on the issue and it seems like a real serious problem for affected users.
The XNA community seems to be Microsoft's first steps to into allowing user-generated content into games. I've talked about Sony implementing this feature on Unreal Tournament 3 for the PS3, and I would love to see similar features implemented on the Xbox. If all goes well with the XNA community, we may see some big leaps in user-generated content. They may seem fairly crippled compared to what we've come to expect, but if it goes over well we could see some very interesting things coming from Microsoft in terms of user customization and content.
Most of us knew about the issues concerning the holiday outage of Live, but it is nice to see some exact numbers; Live is a force to be reckoned with. As for HD-DVD, it's a good thing there wasn't a high attatchment rate. It's also kind of funny to see Microsoft dragging their feet on the subject of switching to Blu-Ray.
