Is it possible to write a commercial XBOX game using Visual Studio and MS XNA Game Studio SDK?

Question

I know most commercial games development is done in assembly or C/C++ but has anyone tried using XNA with VS 2008 to create a real time intensive application that would be fit for release in the high street as oppose to just on XBOX Live. What are the limitations you encountered and what sort of frame rates were you getting and in what resolution?

Obviously you could use it to write something like Championship Manager/Rock Band etc but could you use it to develop a game like Pro Evo?

I suspect I know the answer already but I would love to hear from other peoples experiences with XNA and Visual Studio 2008.

Answer 1

XNA as a technology is certainly capable of delivering performant applications. In some circumstances, such as absolute bleeding edge games, I think it's fair to say that the performance of XNA hasn't been tested.

The larger issue is one of licensing. Microsoft is currently not pushing XNA as a framework for development of professional XBox applications and has targeted it more towards community development. There isn't currently a "professional" targeted XNA platform, and to my knowledge there isn't a retail SKU using XNA.

Answer 2

I think the question really is, why would you? If you're a dev shop wanting to develop a commercial game for the XBOX, you obviously have capital and money to invest. So how much is the official SDK for the XBOX 360 already? I don't know exact numbers, but I'd assume it's ~20k or so. In the grand scheme of things, that's not that much money, so why limit yourself to XNA, when you can have access to the full blown SDK?

Another point, I would assume it would be much easier to develop cross platform if you're developing in native C/C++. I highly doubt any part of your XNA library you'll build for this game will be easily portable to say PS3/PC. And lets face it, more and more big games are going cross platform these days, so it's another thing you need to consider.

I know this doesn't answer your question as to whether it's capable, but I wonder if we'll ever find out....

Answer 3

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/

You can not put an XNA game on a disk to use on an Xbox but you can make it available for purchase and download on the community section of Xbox Live. XNA performs pretty very well, especially so on computer hardware.

Answer 4

Schizoid is a commercial Xbox Live Arcade game (not a Community game) that was developed using XNA.

Torpex Games

Jamie Fristrom discusses the development on his blog:

GameDevBlog

Answer 5

The Dishwasher was developed using XNA: http://thedishwasherdeadsamurai.com/

You can read the developer's (James Silva) blog here: http://skasoftware.wordpress.com/