Published July 2004

XNA tilts video-game advantage to Microsoft

By Lionel Contreras
Guest Columnist

There’s a bit of a buzz going around for something called XNA. What is XNA, and how is it going to change the video-game business are two big questions.

Here’s the bottom line:

Microsoft’s XNA is a new, cleaner method of programming and constructing video games. Because video games have gone from a minor entertainment niche in the software market to a multibillion-dollar industry, lowering the cost of development is a key factor in gaming.

Most game studios spend, on average, more than a million dollars to bring each concept to a beta stage. For every game on the shelf there are at least two betas that died. So those same studios have to absorb millions of dollars of development cost for every game that gets shipped.

XNA lowers development cost by making all the initial boilerplate programming, which is a large part of the initial development expense, compatible with the Windows development software. So, regardless of what programming software is being used, the XNA pieces will easily interconnect with other gaming software. Before, the game studios had to custom make all the parts that fit together for the final product.

XNA has powerful tools to help speed up the designs, with high-level shaders and sound development tools. It allows the programming teams to concentrate on the game levels, character development and game content instead of focusing on the working nuts and bolts that makes everything run within the game.

Because XNA also deals with unifying the controllers across platforms, it eliminates the time and money spent on how users interface with games, making them cross-platform compliant so the game studio doesn’t have to redevelop the controllers for the PC, Xbox and the Windows wireless platforms individually.

With the development cost decreased, more games can be built that are more geared toward the complexity of game play. This allows more beta games to be produced and more successful products to be created and marketed because budget limits will no longer kill off so many complicated, high-cost, high-risk game designs in their conception stage.

In the corporate battle for billions of gaming dollars, this gives the PC and Xbox game designers a clear advantage over Sony PlayStation software designers. Also, since XNA will easily allow PC players and Xbox players to interact with each other, you will see cross-platform games that bring the previously separated “platform” player and “PC desktop” player together. This will mark the start of developing genre-busting games.

The availability of XNA technology will allow Xbox to catch up with PlayStation, the market leader, and give it a serious run for its money. With the coming of this next-generation of console games, it won’t be the hardware as much as the software that defines the platform — and XNA tilts that advantage toward Microsoft.

To read more on XNA, go to www.heraldnet.com/games and select the blog on XNA. The official XNA site is www.microsoft.com/xna/.

And for those of you who are interested in developing your own indie games, you can get the Direct X software development kit (SDK) at http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/.

Lionel Contreras is a systems technician for The Herald.

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