40 Days #31: Open up XNA and Live Anywhere to browser-based gaming

Every so often, when Cindy Lou Grue would post on the Gamerscore Blog (by the way, is she still even on the team?), I would get a little shocked because she would remind me that Microsoft's MSN Games casual game portal still exists. The other bloggers would be going on about their gamerscores, friends lists, multiplayer experiences, and Cindy's posts would always feel oddly "disconnected".

That makes you wonder why exactly Microsoft isn't doing something, anything, to somehow integrate the casual portal into the rest of its gaming network. They even have a section of of MSN games for Vista - the perfect example of "games for Windows" - and yet none of those integrates with the Live network. I'm not even asking for them to be distributed through a PC marketplace (well, sure, eventually, but anything at all would be a start), but why aren't those games part of the Games for Windows Live program? Some of them even have counterparts available on Xbox Live Arcade, so it just seems weird to see them as completely isolated experiences.

At the very least all of the Vista-ready MSN games should be brought into the Live family. Such casual PC games are ideal candidates to be developed quickly and cheaply using XNA tools, including all the multiplayer and Live profile capabilities. In fact, how about an indie section on the PC service, where XNA developers could list their works? Perhaps a cross between the recently announced XBLA Community Games initiative and Windows Live Gallery - for games.

Then the next step would be to look at the web-based games. Move them over to Silverlight, which opens up game development in .NET, while still targeting the browser. Enable Silverlight as a target platform in the XNA tools, so that developers have yet another "recompile and run" option. Sure, it wouldn't be as simple, given the more limited processing and graphical capabilities available in the browser. But that probably wouldn't really matter for most games anyway. The core gameplay of Hexic is the same, whether you play it on an Xbox 360, as a native PC program, or in a browser. The visuals might be different, but it's still the same game underneath.

Silverlight Live Anywhere games would certainly be a novel idea, especially since the technology is coming to Nokia phones. Hopefully, it will also one day be available on Windows Mobile devices. At that point, a Silverlight game could potentially run on a number of mobile devices. Give it Live network connectivity, storage in the cloud, and Microsoft's Live Anywhere vision could all of a sudden become a reality for millions of people.

Again, if these web games (and eventually all Live games) could store their data in the service itself, different versions of the same game could share a player's progress. Certainly at least simple games - for example, casual crack like Peggle - could easily be played on PCs, consoles, and mobile devices, all the while sharing the same achievements, scores, and saved checkpoints.

Here's another angle to why the casual portal needs to tie into Xbox Live. Microsoft is constantly searching for a way to capture the casual players - to make them buy and play console games. Yet the vast majority of these casuals already belongs to Microsoft anyway - they play those games on a PC most likely running Windows.

So let's say your average housewife - a typical member of the casual game segment - wants to play a quick game in her browser. Since MSN Games already has its own version of user accounts, just switch them to Xbox Live accounts. Explain to her some of the benefits of signing up for free, and let her create a free Silver account. Right there you have another Live member. She'll start accumulating a centralized gamerscore, with a history of what she has been playing. Maybe she'll add some of her friends to her list, and tell others to join so that they can compare achievements.

Then she might come home, and her kids have a 360. She might feel intimidated at first, but if she understands that she can use her existing account to sign in, maybe it would ease her worries of playing something "too hardcore". She might explore the Marketplace, pick up some Arcade games, send some messages to her friends. And there you have another customer, ready to spend money on games and downloadable content.

Microsoft's current fragmented approach to its gaming properties just means that potential and current gamers aren't getting the full benefit of service and network synergies that only Microsoft can bring together right now. And that's a shame. So let's see Silverlight game development in XNA Studio 3.0, or at least 4.0 at the latest, and let's bring in the millions of casual browser gamers. After all, they need to get started on their achievement addictions too.