Not that its news, but XNA along with a membership to the XNA Creators Club allows developers to create games in a unified system for both Windows and XBox 360. Although XNA uses C#, which I personally had reservations against, it is actually quite easy to develop on and even fun to use. XNA has now abated these reservations about C# and has persuaded me to try to port my project to the 360.

With sound, networking, a solid widely used gamepad interface, and excellent graphics capabilities the XNA platform seems ideal for small games development. The only reservations still present are against the relative immaturity of the community (as opposed to Ogre’s which is superb) and the lack of distribution mechanisms. The distribution problem is slated to be resolved with a rating system within the developer community, but this just comes back to the other problem.

There is, still, a significant amount of community generated content for learning and using XNA, but I worry about the platform if it does not attract a higher concentration of mature developers. We shall see.