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Yesterday, Microsoft announced during the Gamefest 2006-event in Seattle, the XNA Game Studio Express. Like the name says, it is a development tool to allow developers, hobbyists and students to write games for the PC and XBox360.
Like the other express editions, it will be available for free, at least if you want to develop for the PC. If however you want to develop for the 360, a fee of 99 dollar is to be payed. This way, developers get access to the "Creators Club". Members of this club can build and test their games on the 360 platform. The distribution of these home-brewn games is probably to be done via the Xbox Live Arcade.
The mayor reason Microsoft wants to attract more people to developing games, is the current cost involved these days to develop a full-blown game. "Big" games cost big money and take up to 3 years to develop. Companies like EA, MS... don't dare to take risks to develop anything new, so the creativity is limited. Developers can't really try out new concepts. With these tools, more people are able to make their ideas into reality, perhaps opening up a whole new world for the game-industry.
Over time, MS hopes to have an entire community where people can distribute their games, and can express their opinion on other games, seperating the hits from the flops.
Now, about the launch date... Microsoft is expecting to launch the first CTP by the end of August. The final version will be released be released in November or perhaps December of this year!
The programming language used will be C#.
Microsoft is said to be doing this to keep get more people on the 360 platform, and keep them away from the PS3, which is due somewhere later this year.