All sorts of XNA Goodness Announced - Community XNA Games via XBox Live and XNA on the Zune!

XNA 101 - XNA Community Games on the 360, and coming to a Zune near you!

"Microsoft just had their GDC keynote address, and boy was it big for XNA.

Microsoft has announced plans to let XNA Creators Club developers write games that any XBox Live subscriber can play, and it's community based. Games developed by the community, peer reviewed by the community, and distributed to the community. I've been dying for a viable distribution mechanism to the masses for XNA, and it looks like we are going to have one. 

...

Add on top of that a surprise announcement of Zune game development using XNA Game Studio, and it's pretty exciting.

More details here, http://creators.xna.com/whatsnew.aspx, looks like we're supposed to see a beta of a lot of this "in the spring" of 2008."

XNA Creators Club Online - What’s New

"Xbox LIVE Community Games

The XNA team is delighted to announce the Xbox LIVE community games, scheduled for launch in the holiday 2008 season, with a beta coming in spring 2008.  This offering gives the opportunity to share, peer review, download and play games created by the community, for the community.  Read the FAQ for more details, or discuss in the special forum thread.

Zune game development with XNA Game Studio 3.0

The XNA Community Games Platform team has announced the first feature of the coming XNA Game Studio 3.0, the ability to build games for the Zune platform.  XNA Game Studio 3.0 allows all game developers to create unique and imaginative games for the entire family of Zune media devices.  This feature gives game developers access to the majority of the XNA framework APIs while retaining a seamless sense of integration with the Zune media experience.

..."

Oh my... That just ROCKS! (and see, I said we might hear about a better deployment story... ;)

That really is going to be to cool to use XNA to code stuff for my Zune. And according to the FAQ all existing Zunes (4/8, 30/80) will work and it will be free to deploy, you can use the wireless interface for ad-hoc multiplayer gaming (I'm thinking Buzzword Bingo at meetings ;) and best of all? Game Studio 3 will work (only) with VS2008.

Beta, beta, beta... I want the Beta!  lol

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Xbox Live Arcade Extensions for XNA Announced - Get Ready to Write "Full" Live Arcade Games in XNA