Critiquing gaming experiences so you don't have to

40 Days #28: Bake all the XNA launchers into the Games Library

Posted by Peter on Mar 4 2008 11:08 PM
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xnalauncherdash Ever since the recent announcement of the Xbox Live Community Games initiative, I have actually motivated myself enough to download XNA Game Studio 2.0 and start looking at the integration between the development tools and the console. Sure, local connectivity between Xbox 360 and computer already existed before, but the the announcement added an Xbox Live launcher to the mix.

What immediately struck me was just how complicated the launcher situation is right now. Regular, non-developer gamers need quite detailed instructions on how to download the new launcher and then the preview games. Part of the confusion is the availability of a number of seemingly different launcher bits - some for Xbox Live, some for connecting to a development machine, and so forth.

Microsoft really needs to combine all of these versions into one XNA client which can figure out whether you have a Creators Club subscription, then enable extra connectivity options when you do, and let everybody else download games over Xbox Live. One smarter client with maybe an extra button or two, and it should take care of all the possible combinations. Games written using the current development tools seem to exist outside the launcher anyway, so there really shouldn't be a need for another copy of it. And, of course, the whole thing just needs to be rolled into the spring dashboard update, so that all Xbox 360 owners have direct access to future community games, without the hassle of figuring out which XNA bits they need to manually download.

2 comment(s)

Comments

Charley Jones said:

Scary, but what MS really did was to quickly recycle the game launcher from the 1.0 version.  So basically, what you're looking at is a game app to download game apps.

# Mar 5, 2008 12:15 AM

Peter said:

That's a good point, and another reason why it shouldn't be too difficult to consolidate all that code and add it to the dash. Otherwise even the developers will end up getting lost among all the launchers.

# Mar 5, 2008 6:21 PM