So to sum up: in order to actually play someone else’s XNA game you have to pay $99 for a year or $49 for 4 months. Pretty heavy price for a gamer to have access to indie “dubias quality” games. I’d conclude that the major subscriber mass are enthusiasts not consumers. People that care about their own creation not other’s.

While this all sounds cool at first in actual practical terms it just borderline impractical as a bussiness model and poor investment of said $99. In this way Microsoft cash in on people’s desire to be creative and successful while severly limiting the target market.

This could be an excellent vehicle of a game idea to be then done wtih full production (if it gets noticed) I can’t see the mass success you are predicting unless the pricing strategy is changed. I can’t see the pricing model changing because that would mean MS would have to certify the games that are released which will produce more costs – unbearable for a bedroom coder.

Sony (and to a lesser extent, Nintendo) already have similar plans, but Microsoft’s first mover advantage should help them again on this front. An interesting move for Nintendo (or some other player) would be to leapfrog the download paradigm and move directly to server-based gaming. The bandwidth infrastructure that will eventually make large content downloads practical will also make server-based gaming possible. And server-based gaming is a more elegant approach with a much lower total system cost. Imagine a simple “Wii-terminal” being used as a portal to powerful server-based games available across the Internet — it makes downloading content onto an Xbox or PS3 console seem out-moded.

Soon developers won’t employ anyone new to the industry who hasn’t had an Xbox Live Community Game published. Every game university course in the world will involve writing XNA games.

So graduates and other newbies will have a proven track record before they even start in the industry proper. This is going to raise standards enormously.

Virtual shelves aren’t that infinity, people tend to stick with main page and “top 10″ rankings. It is happening with the casual game portals in the Internet nowadays – but in the Internet you can have dozens of big portals, while in XBLA you don’t.

Of course it will foster creativity, but as for making money, it will quickly become much harder than the Internet itself. You just won’t have variety of channels to market the game.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=33352