As much as I find Microsofts offerings generally lacklustre, from what I’ve seen. the Xbox 360 Community Games is very likely to remain more open. Shame the only choice is to use XNA. (It seems alright as a framework, but I’m not a fan of being locked into one platform).

The danger is that Xbox Live Community Games will become a cesspool of rubbishy and broken games, but Microsoft seem to be trying to create a decent community-based ‘peer-review’ so that the broken ones won’t launch at all, and the best ones will filter to the top of the list. Hopefully other developers (eg Creators Club members) won’t use this peer-review to knock down good games that they see as competition to their own sales. As long as the community is big enough, that shouldn’t cause a problem.

I suspect one thing Nintendo is paranoid about is that WiiWare could have too much choice too early, splitting the gamers time and dollars away from their and their ‘friends’ offerings. It seems dumb though, they could always allow anyone to develop, but make no promises about what they will actually release on WiiWare (the risk being your that your indie game may never see the light of day if Nintendo don’t like it). Then it would just be up to indie developers to make such a great game that Nintendo couldn’t possibly refuse releasing the “next big hit”.

Do you think things like Microsoft’s upcoming Community Games feature on the 360 might be a better chance at allowing smaller developers to create games free of these constraints? News like this makes me concerned that Microsoft is over promising too lol.

I went to Apple instead for IPhone/ITouch in the end (the potential to be the DS killer at least).

I think it’s a bit harsh as some of the best games and most innovative code has come from indie developers.