Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express: Revolutionary, but Deployment-challenged
XNA Game Studio Express offers .NET developers a free tool for developing games that run on both Windows and Xbox 360. But don't get too excited...this product has serious deployment restrictions.
by A. Russell Jones, Executive Editor
August 15, 2006
his week Microsoft announced a new—and free—product called XNA Game Studio Express to be released on August 30 that supports the XNA Framework—a game-development framework based on the .NET Framework 2.0. Based on Visual C# Express, and targeted at students and hobbyists (don't confuse this with the professional XNA Studio), XNA Game Studio Express gives C# programmers the ability to create cross-platform games that run on both Windows and the XBox 360.
There is a slight catch: If you want to deploy games you develop to other people to run on the XBox 360, you have to purchase an XNA "Creator's Club" subscription, which costs either $99 for one year or $49 for four months. Moreover, according to this Microsoft Federal Development and Platform Evangelism Team Blog, if you want to deliver your brand-new games to other individuals to run on their XBox 360 consoles, the receivers must:
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his week Microsoft 
