Microsoft's Chris Satchell

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced plans to allow small independent developers - even individuals - to put homemade games on Xbox 360 using a new version of XNA Game Studio and the subscription-based XNA Creator's Club. The idea is simple: make a game with XNA, submit it to peer-review, release it on Xbox Live. At the time we were told that a beta test would go on behind the scenes in spring, with a full launch later in 2008.

That beta is now on the verge of beginning, as we found out when we caught up with XNA group general manager Chris Satchell this week. "We always said spring, and we think May is a good time to make sure we've got all the pieces in place for us to record what people do," he told us, with a full launch "by the end of the year". We also spoke about those XNA community games we all got to play in February, XNA on future Xbox platforms and how security sometimes gets in the way of best intentions.

Eurogamer: What specifically will be part of the beta?

Chris Satchell: Well, the beta will be closed - it's for people in the Creator's Club, so it won't be open to everyone on Xbox Live. It will be open to anybody that joins [the Creator's Club], but what we're really trying to test is the full end-to-end process. Can somebody create a game, can they upload it, rate their content, can the community review it. We're going to go through all those stages of build-submit-review-play and make sure that whole pipeline works smoothly, and then also find out how people actually use it.

As a normal consumer, this will go on under the covers, because you'd need to be in the Creator's Club to be able to use it, but if you're in the Creator's Club you'll be able to go to the websites and see what new games there are, get involved in the rankings, and rate the game against the content, and then also when you're on Xbox Live you'll be able to go to a page and see all the games that are coming through and play them all, and really experience what the community's doing.

The XNA community games Xbox Live showcase during GDC probably won't be repeated, but it's the shape of fun to come.

Eurogamer: At GDC you uploaded a few games so that Xbox Live users could check them out. Are you thinking of doing any more of those bundles to keep interest up?

Chris Satchell: Probably not. It would be great to do, but that was a real kind of one-off special technical case, and we're so focused on making the real pipeline work that we don't really have the resources to go in and do that special case again. And also, I think one of the things we found is that - you probably found this from using it - it was a little contrived to have to go in and do everything.

Eurogamer: Yeah, it felt like a bit of a hack.

Chris Satchell: [Laughs] Funny that! We had to do a bunch of special cases to make that happen, and I think it's well worth it because it's great to get the games out and show people what we're doing, but I don't want that to be the consumer experience and that's not the consumer experience we're planning. We're planning something much smoother and better, so I prefer to put all our efforts into making that great rather than doing another special case that doesn't feel quite right.

Eurogamer: We've heard things about the next generation of Xbox Live - shadowy whispers, etc. Will whatever happens next in terms of the platform be built to incorporate this XNA community stuff from the ground up?

Chris Satchell: Well, there's kind of two parts to it. One, there's the tools - and that's always a core part of our platform, it's something we pride ourselves on. We fully believe - whether it's professional or non-professional - that if you give people the best tools it lets their talent shine. I think that's why you see the best games on our platform. When you look over the portfolio, they tend to be better because we fully believe you enable those people.

Now, in terms of making this community pipeline part of our future, I absolutely think that's the case. I think on an ongoing basis you'll see this idea of democratisation of distribution and a great consumer experience be part of our platform going forward. It's sort of like what I said earlier, where you tried that trial and experienced it and it wasn't quite what you wanted - our future plans are to be streamlined and just make it part of your overall experience, so I think as we move forward with our platforms you'll see XNA - both the toolset and the community distribution, etc - be a core part of that.

Eurogamer: Is there a way to bring independent developers who already have their own methods - making Flash games, making games using X, Y or Z - together with this process to democratise distribution for them as well?

Satchell tells us his Gamerscore is rubbish. Then again he's a busy man.

Chris Satchell: It's a little difficult. On the console, understand that one of our key concerns is always security, and that's both security for our publishing partners - we don't want their work being pirated or hacked in any way - and security first and foremost for the gamers - we don't want anything bad to happen to their system.

The core of XNA is, when the games run they run in a sandbox we created, and what we can do then is make it very secure, and we built security from the ground up to make sure there was nothing an XNA Game Studio game could do to the console. So we've got that layer of protection in there and we've put a lot of effort in to try and make that secure and that there are no unintended consequences from running a game.

So that allows us to do the distribution of this community content. The trouble is that if people have built in another system - well, if you take something like Flash, Flash has a Runtime, and if we were to go and take the Runtime and somehow port it to our system, the difference is we architected for our security methods right from the ground up, and other people won't have done that. That's no comment on them - there's no reason why they should have done - but it makes it hard for us to trust any other kind of development system or Runtime because it wasn't designed to be secure in the way ours is.

Eurogamer: After GDC people wanted to know: are there any plans for people to be able to use Achievements for their games?

Chris Satchell: That's a really good question - it's something that, at the moment we're saying no, community games won't have Achievements. We really need to think carefully about, you know, really seeing it work at a grand scale and would it make sense now or not, so there's no plans at the moment. That's not to say it's closed forever, but we really need to see how the community works.

If you think about it, Achievements are a currency, and you need to be very careful when you manage a currency that you don't devalue it in some way, and that's not a comment on the quality of the community games - I think they will be excellent - but I'd hate to have games that pop up that are like, 'click here for 50 Achievement points'. That kind of ruins it for everyone.

Eurogamer: You mentioned the challenges of building up distribution. What challenges are you facing at the moment?

Chris Satchell: Well it's just that there's a lot of infrastructure to build. If you think about it, we've got this complex web front-end to build - complex from our perspective, although hopefully we've made it easy for developers to move through it, but there's a lot there to submit a game, maybe a screenshot, text, I need to be able to go and do the ratings on that, check its progress, people need to give me feedback - and then we've got this whole backend pipeline that can manage this whole process and all the reviews that come in from the other community members, can track it, make sure it's ready for distribution, then can package it all up and put it into our backend catalogues and things that we use to populate content on Xbox Live.

Then we have to work out a way for consumers to get to it easily. We're going to have a consumer-facing site on Windows as well, so you can go to the web and track all the content there and send people links to games you like, and so really it's just a lot of infrastructure we have to build and then link to a lot of other complex processes to make all this work. It's a big cross-group architecture effort to put all this together. And remember at the same time we're working on Game Studio 3.0, which will allow you to develop for Zune as well. We showed that at GDC, and we're still working on improving the tools side at the same time we're doing the pipeline.

Eurogamer: The peer-review system seems like it has the potential to be used outside XNA. One of the things that's in the headlines a lot is Epic's problem of wanting to do modifications for Unreal Tournament 3. Is the peer-review system something that could be reused to allow modified content of that nature?

Satchell was nice enough to explain how programming environments work, and now we try and use "Runtime" in as many sentences as possible.

Chris Satchell: There's two parts to that question. Let me address the first one. I think, assuming we're successful, I think the pipeline really is an incredible piece of innovation that will definitely enable other scenarios, and what's important about it is it's really addressing some of the problems with user-generated content.

I think we're seeing from some of the lawsuits out there - outside of our industry - that just saying you have reactive takedown isn't enough. You need to be more proactive about protecting people's IP and having content that's acceptable. So I think that's a major innovation. I absolutely believe that our pipeline, if successful, can help inform the design of those or even be used directly for other parts of our business.

Now the modding's a little different. Yes it could help rate mods, but the core issue of modding is what we talked about earlier - if you're not running in that sandbox, how do you guarantee security?

That's really where we've got stuck - making sure that nothing will hurt the user's system, and I'm a little disturbed when I think about other systems and people using what we call native code - code that goes right down to the metal - and then allowing people to run script mods on top of that without the right security measures. It could be really dangerous.

We've drawn a hard line because we very much care about security, and it seems like some other platforms don't seem to care quite as much. That kind of worries me for consumers. But all I can control is what we do on our platform, so that's where I'm going to focus - we're going to keep you safe because that's really important to us.

Eurogamer: So not even needing to read between the lines, you're saying that there's a potential risk to consumers of PS3?

Chris Satchell: I think there's a potential risk on any platform where you're allowing...where you're running in what we call native mode, where you're writing straight to the metal, not a sandbox layer like XNA, and then that runs a script engine and you let people do that in that script engine.

Really what works in this industry is the people who have access to that native metal of the console, that go through these processes, are financially invested in this industry; they wouldn't do anything bad. Developers want to do good things because they want this industry to work. There's a lot of people out there that just want to prove they can screw things up.

I think there's very mature, sensible hackers who just want to prove how good they are, and they don't cause harm, and there's malicious hackers, and any platform that let's you do that, and doesn't have the right security measures in place - whether it's Sony, whether it's Nintendo, whether it's Apple, whether it's anyone - you're inviting trouble, because sooner or later someone will want to prove they can do it.