This year, Game Developers Conference was host to some great announcements regarding XNA.

The thing I am most excited about is the Xbox LIVE community games. This offering will give us all the opportunity to share our games, review our peers, and play games made by other developer, all on the Xbox 360. The process will be something in the lines of: submit the game, other CC subscribers will review it, ensuring the content is appropriate and a certain quality is met, and then the game will become available to any gamer owning a 360 (including non CC subscribers). Also, it seems developer will have the option to gain some money for their games (assuming the games are worth paying for) , but more details on this will only be known later. The Xbox LIVE Community games program will be launched in later 2008. More detail about this can be found here, and the FAQ for Xbox Live Community Games is here.

Related to the above point, you can now download a few XNA games, including the future XBLA game, The Dishwasher (made by James Silva, winner of DBP2007), and other very cool games, like Little Gamers (made by Epsicode) and Culture. These are provided as demos, for a limited time, and they give a little taste of what Xbox Live Community Games will mean.

Another announcement is the redesign of the Creator’s Club Online website, which will start in spring 2008. Beside allowing the submission of gamefor Xbox Live Community Games, it will be the “Grand Central Station for all things related to game development”, as Dave Weller puts it. This means that the site will have a section for the community created tutorials, samples, articles and blogs. Read more here, and the F.A.Q. is here.

Finally, first thing we know about XNA GS 3.0 (besides the fact that they’re working on it) is the new platform it can be used for. XNA GS 3.0 will allow you to write games for Microsoft’s Zune. Of course, you won’t have 3D graphics on Zune, but it’s nice to know that we can now write games for all Microsoft platforms. It seems that coding for Zune will not allow a CC Subscription, and you will be able make multiplayer games between several Zunes which connect wirelessly to each other, in a local network. More detail here, and F.A.Q. here.

A beta version of XNA Game Studio 3.0, with Zune support will come in spring 2008.

I’m very excited about this, as the rest of the XNA community, and I can’t wait for more details. Now I’ll get back to playing The Dishwasher and Little Gamers.

Let the games begin!

P.S. Make sure you visit #xna on Efnet, where you can meet Epsicode, James, as well as the rest of us XNA-loving guys.