and/or..
the McDonalds approach to seeding consumers developers for the future.
(get em while they're young).  

http://www.cnn.com/2006....ex.html

they're making the root of the Xbox SDK available to kids for a $99/month subscription.  kinda like how Garage Games sold the rights to develop on the Torque Engine to young wannabe developers for $99 (flat fee).  I bought a Torque kit myself.  it gives all the tools you need to develop/distribute homemade games on the torque engine.

the XboxLive kit will be a stripped-down version of the XBOX SDk that the pros use to develop PC games for windows Xbox games.

now young kids everywhere can learn from the ground up, that XBOX is the (only?) microsoft gaming platform (not windows).

--> the "mod" community is being ported to Xbox.    

[Lenny Kravitz] "... P - C- gam-ING's DEEAD""[/Lenny]

It's $99 per year, not month.  And while it does seem somewhat high, if someone can make a game in two years (which they retain the rights to) or less, and gets it distributed for free over Live, that's still a tremendous bargain.  It also opens up the console scene to non-professional development.  Before now, it was prohibitively expensive, which meant the good, independent ideas couldn't make it to console (a huge market effectively left untapped).

No matter how evil you want to make it sound, this can only be a good thing for developers.

great...
i dont wanna play games on a console, and i dont want to be foreced to in the future...

A six inch steel blade was placed firmly in the back of PC gaming the day the xbox was released.
This is that blade being twisted.

No one's forcing anyone to play games on console.  All this is doing is making it as easy to develop for a console as for the PC.  What's wrong with that?

Actually if you think about it, the SDK MUST be used on the PC right?  So that means that unless the xbox has a PC to XBox adapter, you have to be able to compile the stuff and test it on the PC.  I smell XBox emulators.  Good ones too.  Add that with modding abilities and you've got Halo 2 that doesn't suck.  Who wouldn't pay for that?

when the Xbox emulator comes,  
there will be no reason for publishers to make a "PC-CDROM" version of any game
--> all "PC" games will be sold in a green box with an XBOX header (under an XBOX liscence)

there will be no reason to release "PC-CDROM" games anymore at all.

And then the end will come.

I hadn't thought of that...
*clings to his copy of Half-Life 2*
Don't take away my keyboard and mouse... please....

Quote (Cobalt60 @ Aug. 15 2006, 3:39 pm)

when the Xbox emulator comes,   there will be no reason for publishers to make a "PC-CDROM" version of any game --> all "PC" games will be sold in a green box with an XBOX header (under an XBOX liscence) there will be no reason to release "PC-CDROM" games anymore at all.

Well, the success of that would depend on the quality falloff between a PC-CDROM game and an xbox emulated game running on a PC.

If there isn't one, then why would anybody care?  I assume any game company that didn't want to go that particular xbox route would just release a PC-CDROM game as normal, wouldn't they?