Do you want to be a famous games creator? Or just share your vision about games with a community? Then Microsoft has all you need. During GDC 2008, Chris Satchell, general manager and chief XNA architect at Microsoft, announced that the games created with Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio 2.0 would be made available on the Xbox Live Marketplace.

So, in order to create a game all you need is the latest version of XNA Game Studio, 2.0. Released last year in December, XNA Game Studio 2.0, has added more than 15 new features compared with the first version launched in 2006.

Satchell unveiled the first seven games created with XNA Game Studio and he said Microsoft would start to offer the XNA Game Studio 2.0 development tool kit for free.

The seven titles presented by Satchell are mainly action, strategy and puzzle games. For example, “JellyCar”, created by Walaber from the United States, is about driving a squishy car through squishy worlds, trying to reach the exit. “Culture”, which was created by independent game development company Hidden Path Entertainment from the United States contains challenging games and puzzles based on beautiful flowers.

Another title, “ProximityHD”, created by Brian Cable from the United States, takes the essence of strategy games - battles for control of territory and armies - and distills it down to a simple, easy-to-understand set of rules for casual players.
Basically, anyone could develop a game with XNA Game Studio 2.0, Satchell noted. The title will be evaluated by the Xbox Live peer review group. Any user from Xbox Live could become a member of a peer review group by paying an $99 annual fee.

If the new game do not infringe on intellectual property and are not composed of content that is extremely objectionable, it will be released to the 10-million users community from Xbox Live.

With XNA Game Studio 2.0, Microsoft hopes not only to encourage people to join Xbox Live service, but also to attract more independent programmers and small companies who want to create games for a living.

Microsoft’s initiative could prove to be very useful for the company. In a time when producing a new game has become a real business involving many millions of dollars (analysts estimate that a game may require a budget as high as $30 million), the companies are less and less willing to invest in new ideas when they do not have the certainty of their success. And Microsoft is aware that the next chapter in the gaming console war will be about new, quality, exclusive games.

Last year, the release of Halo 3 boosted the sales of Xbox 360, while the sales of PlayStation 3 were lagging due to the lack of new, attractive titles.

But is very hard to convince an established game company to develop an exclusive title for a certain platform. In the past, Microsoft tried very hard to get if not exclusivity for the games, then at least more support from important gaming studios such as Electronic Arts or Take Two.

But with XNA and Xbox Live, Microsoft may revolutionize the gaming industry by creating a huge library of exclusive titles. Microsoft hopes to release 1000 XNA-created games until the end of 2008 and who knows what interesting project or idea may pop up?

Who can really tell if the next Halo 3 or Grand Theft Auto isn’t ready to be born from the mind of a XNA Game Studio user?