XNA V3 Announced with Support for Xbox Live Publishing

What a week it's been; on Tuesday we launched DreamSpark and gave all UK students access to our developer tools and today we announced the impending release of XNA Game Studio 3.0 and game publishing on Xbox Live Marketplace!

The key feature announced for Game Studio V3 is support for a new hardware platform... the Zune. Although the Zune is not currently available in the UK it is clear to see the huge potential this announcement has especially with support for multiplayer gaming over the Zunes wireless link and APIs for accessing content on the device thrown into the mix. You can find a FAQ on Zune game dev over on the XNA forums here and the original post announcing this feature on the XNA Team Blog.

The second big announcement for XNA is the ability to publish your games onto Xbox Live Marketplace making them available to anyone with a Live subscription. This is a feature that we have been asked for again and again and now its on its way (scheduled for launch in the summer). The really cool thing about this new publishing platform is that it will also provide mechanisms for you to generate revenue from your games. You can find out more on the XNA Team Blog and at the FAQ on the XNA forums.

To complement all these advances and allow for future developments the XNA Creators Club Web site is also going to have a full overhaul with a bunch of new features and content. Again there is an FAQ available here and you can find out more about all of today's exciting announcements at the 'What's New" section on the Creators Club site.

Have fun!

Technorati Tags: XNA,Game Studio 3.0,Xbox Live Marketplace,Creators Club,DreamSpark,Zune