I just got out of the keynote session at Gamefest, where they announced XNA Game Studio Express.  You’ve read some of the news online, and I’ve gotten some questions about how the new software is going to work. 

You can get started on building some games on Windows by downloading the no charge beta of XNA Game Studio Express from http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna.  This holiday, you can create and play games using XNA Game Studio Express on your Xbox 360 retail console.  For that, you’ll need an active XNA Game Studio Express “Creator’s Club” subscription for Xbox 360 which may be purchased through Xbox Live Marketplace for $99 a year or $49 for a four-month trial (in Microsoft Points).

The XNA Game Studio Express “Creator’s Club” is an annual subscription offering that lets you share games among other subscribers.  It will provide Starter Kits, partner promotions and discounts and product support. Eventually we envision a “Community Arcade” offering for members of the Creator’s Club where their video games can be shared and enjoyed broadly by gaming consumers in a manner similar to YouTube for videos.

Todd Bishop wrote up some details in the Seattle PI, which gives a pretty good overview. 

"XNA Game Studio Express (is) a set of software development tools that will be free for Windows and cost $99 a year for the Xbox 360 console. The tools will be released in stages in the coming months.

Games made with XNA Game Studio Express will be playable only by others who have the same development program for Windows or Xbox. But at some point in the future, the company says it may open things up to let any Xbox or Windows user play the games. … But the availability of the user-generated games for a general audience would be well down the road, Moore said, calling it the "blue sky, visionary" part of the plan. He declined to speculate on the time frame or how the economics would work.

…On Aug. 30, it will make a preliminary version of the game development tools for Windows publicly available for download. Later this year, around the holiday season, the company will release a final version, said Dave Mitchell, marketing director in the company's game developer group. [...]

Also around the holidays, the company will release the $99-a-year XNA Game Studio Express components for Xbox 360. That will make it possible to take games created on Windows and play them on the Microsoft game console, Mitchell said.

This spring, Microsoft will also offer a commercial version of the program, dubbed XNA Game Studio Professional, for people who want to go through the traditional process of getting their games published.

With the Express version, the hobbyists and students will initially be able to share their games by posting them to community Web sites for others to download. Many of the files will be small enough that they can be e-mailed, Mitchell said.
Moore said the company also wants to start work "in the next 12 months or so" on a section of the Xbox Live online service for users of the Xbox component of XNA Game Studio Express. There, they would be able to share the games they make and find games created by others."