Submitted by: kirkland on Monday August 14th, 2006 at 09:29 AM EST

A new game development platform from Microsoft allows anyone to create games for its Xbox 360 console, the company said on Monday.

Typically, console games are designed by large studios that must pay high prices to buy development kits in order to write games for consoles. Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express is a new development kit, to be released in beta form in August, that will be available for free to anyone using a Windows XP PC. The kit is designed for game developer novices as well as studios, Microsoft said.

Users will have the option of joining a developers group for US$99 per year in which they can share and test their games with other designers and access information that could help them speed up the development process.

The XNA Game Studio Express development environment is based on Visual Studio Express and .NET, and allows developers to create games simultaneously for Xbox 360 and Windows XP.

» Full story @ Macworld