No Immediate Plans to Get Zune Games Into the Open
By Chris on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 2:49 PM PST In Game Companies, Game Platforms, Games, Microsoft, Portable
Microsoft is going to be pushing their XNA initiative hard on the Xbox 360 front, and while the tools are out there for development on Zune, don’t expect to see XNA community games on your iPod wannabe anytime soon.
“At the moment Zune for us is really just a development target,” Chris Satchell told 1UP. “We haven’t really thought about the game programs for it. It’s more, “Hey, this is a really interesting piece of hardware. It could be really fun to game on. Let’s take that first step like we did with Xbox 360 of opening up the platform to the community developer.” And so in May we launched our community tech preview of XNA Game Studio for Zune. And it’s really just to open up that hardware for the community and see where they go with it.”
When asked how close we were to having a broader distribution system for XNA games on Zune, Satchell explained, “The only mechanism right now is sort of how it started on Xbox 360. You can package it up and send it to other people who have downloaded the toolset, and then they can push it to their Zune and play it. We haven’t decided about a marketplace yet. We’re really just focused on the development side first.”
That’s pretty disappointing to hear as a Zune owner, but it’s not like Microsoft has a lingering promise about Zune games hanging out there. Hopefully the XNA Community Games launch goes smoothly this holiday on Xbox 360 so that Microsoft can shift its efforts to bringing XNA games to PC and Zune.
