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XNA Creators Club area is now the App HUB!
If you go to the XNA Creators’ Club website today, you will notice that something is different. In fact, things are so different that you might not realise it's the same site at all!
Microsoft has completely overhauled the developer area and is quite clearly pushing development for Windows Phone 7 to the forefront.
Joystick.com wrote: "If you fancy yourself an Xbox Live Indie Games developer, you might have noticed a change to the XNA Creators Club today. In conjunction with the unveiling of Windows Phone 7, it appears that Microsoft has quietly changed the Creators Club to the much more generalized 'App Hub.' The site purports to offer resources for developers to create applications for both Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360, though the site currently seems to favor the former.
In fact, the Education Roadmap section, which introduces would-be programmers to XNA Game Studio, only offers tutorials for Windows Phone 7. Of course, it's understandable that Microsoft would want to recruit as many programmers as possible for its new baby. There are still examples and code snippets for Windows and Xbox 360 programming, but hopefully we'll see some more robust introductory tutorials in the future."
The aesthetics are much cleaner, and we can understand why they've made the change, but it does leave us wondering if focusing on Windows Phone 7 is going to detract from resources put into XBLIG.
Considering Nathan Fouts’s recent complaints about the broken Xbox Marketplace, the new focus on mobile phone devotement makes it seem unlikely that existing issues will get addressed.
It also leaves us wondering if this rebranding to attract phone app developers will increase the number of non-game titles on the Xbox 360 (already a growing concern amongst some XBLIG developers).
We’re not necessarily convinced this change is a bad thing, but you could say that we are currently experiencing reserved suspicion...
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What do you think of the new design?
Let us know in the comments section!
Source: twitter.com – joystiq.com – create.msdn.com
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