And on the seventh day, the development of Remote Masseuse was completed. Cannily released just before Valentine’s Day, with a description that suggested it be used for long-distance erotic chats, it inspired many internet stories that helped it earn just under $7,000 in a month. It’s a cute tale. Some XNA developers would also have you believe it’s a tragedy for the Xbox Live Community Games (CG) service: that six months after launch, and following the release of its first sales figures, it runs the risk of becoming a paradise for the no-budget gimmick app and inferior versions of XBLA games.

The reason? Remote Masseuse dominated the CG top ten list, and in one month outsold the majority of games on the service. And at the time of writing you can also turn your 360 into an aquarium, a clock, a calculator, a fireplace or a foot massager, among many other things. “There are things out there,” begins Scott Austin, Microsoft’s director of digitally distributed games, “directions we might be surprised by, like Rumble Massage or Remote Masseuse – I don’t know if you can call them games, but those are great examples of people taking this new thing and redefining it for us in ways we thought it’d never be defined as.”


_{^{The surprisingly unerotic Remote Masseuse}}

We don’t think decidedly unerotic rumbling software is a game, but perhaps Microsoft is keen to live up to its hardcore reputation. It’s easy to dismiss the frothing of developers whose fighting, puzzling and shooting games didn’t do as well as a piece of software that turns the vibrate function of the Xbox controller on and off, but the success of Remote Masseuse raises two fundamental questions about CG six months after launch: what are Community Games, and are they any good for gamers?

The first answer is easy enough: roughly 220 (and rapidly rising) pieces of software, of which a conservative half are pretty abysmal genre clones, then a sprinkling of ‘apps’, a few polished efforts that are otherwise unremarkable, and a small handful of diamonds in the rough. The fact there’s a lot of bilge shouldn’t surprise anyone – the point of the whole initiative is, after all, an open channel.

An open channel with one caveat: access depends on coding with Microsoft’s proprietary C#-based XNA tools, specifically XNA Game Studio. Version 3.0 of Game Studio arrived in October last year with the capability to distribute games on Xbox 360, and Version 3.1 was announced at the most recent GDC, adding, among other things, avatar support.

Talk to developers and all you hear is praise. Chris Simpson, of Lemmy&Binky Indie House, says C# is a major factor for Community Games: “It’s so nice and fast to do anything with. We had a forum competition about making a game in a month, and the amount we could do in a month with C# was massive compared to what we could have done in C++.”


_{^{Lemmy&Binky Indie House's forthcoming Paws}}

James Silva of Ska Studios adds: “Microsoft’s wonderful but it does have this habit of using its own technologies. It’s C#-based and it’s got little nuances and quirks, and I love working with it. It’s so easy, I just can’t imagine working with something else like C++.”

The cost? XNA Game Library is a free download, and to join the XNA Creators Club and publish your games on the CG channel requires a $99 annual membership. That gets a thumbs-up from us, and XNA’s global adoption by universities marks it as a crucial toolset for gaming’s future. More importantly, Sony’s Net Yaroze may have pioneered home console development for hobbyists but the closest its productions ever got to the sitting room was distribution on demo discs with Official PlayStation Magazine. ‘Microsoft ends the console war’ ran E136’s bombastic coverline for the XNA announcement. It didn’t, obviously, but through the CG channel XNA has done something much more impressive: it’s delivered no-budget games developed by unknowns to the living-room TV.

The channel launched with NXE, and was perhaps overshadowed in those first weeks by the breadth of Microsoft’s additions and changes to Xbox 360. Microsoft was wise enough to stay away from any firm objectives, or even expectations, for the service. “Our perspective is always test-learn-iterate,” says Austin, “and what we’re doing here with CG has never been done before, so we didn’t try to predict what would happen. It was just an idea saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we empower every developer in the world to put out a game, unfettered and unbeholden to the process that’s kind of arduous at times for getting a game on to a console? And we’ll see what happens’.”


_{^{Carneyvale Showtime, in which the object is to perform acrobatic stunts}}

What has happened is that, despite the surfeit of bad games, a few early efforts make excellent arguments for CG’s existence. CarneyVale Showtime is a simple concept brought to vivid life that sees you throwing an acrobat from pole to pole using just his own quirky momentum. It’s colourful stuff with a polished central mechanic, and would raise no eyebrows as an XBLA release. Miner Dig Deep mixes extremely simple Rogue elements with a slowed-down revival of Dig Dug’s core idea, seeing you spend hours crafting a 200-metre descent for a beautiful ruby. Groov is a neat spin on Geometry Wars with a nasty habit of stealing half an hour here and there.

In this context, it’s surprising that the release of sales figures for the first four months of the service was followed by largely negative press. A misunderstanding of the service’s scope produced internet headlines such as ‘XNA Games don’t sell, don’t make money’ and an abundance of stories which sprang from Microsoft’s claim, prior to the release of the data, that “several Community Games top sellers will be taking home more income from four months of sales than the average US citizen earns in a full year”. It’s an understandable piece of PR puff – it does, after all, have the virtue of being true – but raised expectations a little high and inspired a hyperbolically titled thread on the official XNA forums: ‘I got my sales numbers and I want to cry’. The originator of this thread was the developer of early CG title Organon, a visually appealing but hugely shallow shooter, who posted that: ‘Organon was always supposed to be throwaway, but I am still disappointed. I would have posted [sales numbers] if they were halfway decent (and I was setting a low bar), [but] they are not’.