XBLA Creators Club & T360

#1 Nope.

The XBox developer approval process is arduous and expensive. The Creator's Club is simple and inexpensive, but has its own set of caveats.

To access TGEA 360 (which has been out since the 360), you would need to be an approved developer with a devkit so that you can access the XDK.

You could also look into XNA, though nothing is solid on releases and commercial opportunities of XBLA with 3.0 yet.

#2 David, actually there aren't many answers about that how difficult and expensive it would be to become an approved XBOX developer. I (and may be many others) will be happy if you share your thoughts about it.

#3 I had a big, long response with links but then Firefox crashed on me while opening a PDF in another tab. Grrr.

The cost of a devkit was around $10,000. I'm not sure if it is still the same. However, you had to be part of a dedicated team with proven releases and professional staff with knowledge of the industry to get a nod for an NDA and enter negotiations, let alone the XDK. Just having $10,000 burning a hole in your pocket is no guarantee you'll see one. Many of the kits aren't released to developers at all, but to publishers who then utilize them among their developers.

Jeff Tunnell wrote up a great blog on XBLA development.

Quote:Right now, I wouldn't consider attempting to make an XBLA game with a $100,000 budget. Development kits and Certification (QA testing) would eat up half of that, not leaving much for the actual game development.

A huge part of that is in certification. If you can afford the XDK (assuming approval), you're still not out the door and running.

Quote:So, 120,000 units * $10 per unit = $1.2MM. That is a nice number for an Indie, but that is not the whole story....The publicly available information on this is that the distribution fees for bringing a game to XBLA is 35-70% depending upon participation by MS, i.e. the publisher gets 30-65% of the money collected for game sales...Let's say you are a publisher or a developer that is able to fund your own development, so, a $10 game (800 Gamer Points) would net you $6.50, or 120,000 units * $6.50 per unit = $780,000.

There's a lot of interesting information on the N+ port to XBLA as well.

Quote:In an Independent Games Summit talk on Tuesday, Metanet's Mare Sheppard and Slick Entertainment's Nick Waanders discussed the making of N+ for Xbox Live Arcade, debuting on XBLA tomorrow, taking a great in-depth nuts and bolts view of making a downloadable console game, and estimating a $125,000 minimum cost to make an Xbox Live Arcade game...As for how the game is funded, the Canadian duo managed to get Government funding from Telefilm for the game, with the duo explaining that it's a loan that's repaid out of profit. Sheppard then showed a full breakdown of N+'s costs - with $214,000 in total development dollars for the game.

Did you have to do all the localization stuff on your own?
RB: Yeah. Well, we had to pay for it.
MS: Because we published.

There's a lot more info out there if you search, as well. I just don't have the energy to re-search and post it all after the crash.

#4 That's more than enough, David. Thanks a lot for the time you took to give us this useful information.
As far as I understand you talked about downloadable games only (games which can be bought via XBLA). But i am sure that the requirements and licenses for a disc based title for Xbox360 are the same(or may be almost the same). At XBLA a game is sold for about 5-15 dollars, but a disc based title may be sold for 19-59 dollars which makes the profit bigger.

I would like to make something clear for myself as I am afraid I might have misunderstood you.
$10000(approximately) is the cost for the XDK which i have to pay to Microsoft, am i right? After that I need to get a license for TGEA360 SDK(which is an already ported for Xbox360 engine version of TGEA).

#5 That would be correct. You would have to purchase T360 on top of the XDK license once approved by MS. T360 interfaces with the XDK, which is why it is required. AFAIK, the boxed licensing process is extremely harsh as well when it comes to certification, though it does not have the same requirements as XBLA in terms of networking and such. Of course, boxed distribution usually requires major publisher backing to get your title on the shelves as well. It is an extremely different world than just developing your game.

#6 I got it! Thanks, David :)

#7 Hello,
So let me get this straight, with Torque360 and games that are bigger than 150mb's, XBLA's limit, you have to purchase the $10,000 dollar kit and your game has to be put on disc? I have a multiplayer game almost ready to go (done with TGE but would be ported to TGEA Click here to see demo) and it's between 600-800mb's Is this impossible to be put on XBLA period? Does Microsoft allow the occasional bigger game to be on XBLA?
I'm just wondering if it's at all worth doing all the extra work to convert to TGEA to somehow get it on the xbox?
Thx.

#8 I've been following Koth for a while and love the style and art direction. I would strongly recommend asking this question of Microsoft. I'm not sure how large Ikaruga and Castlevania: SOTN were, but I thought I read that they were larger than the usual XBLA download size...and the XBox originals program as well as updated content for Tomb Raider Anniversary (purchasable and downloadable if you owned TR:Legends) are ripe for "special exceptions" but I do not know exactly how the regular restrictions were negotiated. You can contact licensing here about it as well, though most of our XBox 360 stuff is negotiated after the Microsoft negotiations occur. They may have some more information.