XNA Creators Club Beta Feedback
I'm a big fan of XNA and what Microsoft is trying to do with the XNA Creators Club. Microsoft recently released the Creators Club as a beta and I've had the chance to play with it. The Creators Club is a fantastic step forward for hobbyists and I thought I would take some time to give some feedback on the current beta.
Much of this feedback centers on creating a circle of communication between the game developers and the community.
My immediate suggestions:
- Don't require games to be in a final state before it can be downloaded; hobbyists need feedback for incomplete games. Introduce the idea of a 'feedback' (think alpha/beta) release that is available to premium members. In this state premium members aren't performing a review for acceptance for download by the entire Live community but instead performing a test so feedback can be given to the developer. When creating a 'feedback' release the developer can place a note requesting what in particular they would like feedback on.
- Allow games to be downloaded from the dashboard when in the 'feedback' or 'review' states. The need to download to a PC and then to a 360 seems unnecessary.
- Allow a convenient way for premium members to give feedback to the developer during 'feedback' and 'review' states. Developers currently have to create a root forum post under a particular community forum; it would be nice to see this more integrated with the game profile page and have feedback actively solicited from premium members who have downloaded the game.
- For publicly released games allow any Live user that has played the game to give a review/rating of the game. I personally like the idea of rating various components of the game (i.e., story, graphics, game play) as well providing an overall value. This is a feature that, in my opinion, should be available on ALL content on the Marketplace.
- Add a 'reputation'-style system for users that provide feedback and ratings. In essence this allows developers to rate the feedback given to their games. The reputation should be focused on how constructive the criticism is. Instead of a 'star' rating (as seen on Gamertags), perhaps it is word-based such as 'Helpful', 'Not Constructive', etc. The reputation is meant to discourage users from leaving non-constructive messages like 'yer game sux' while also minimizing the risk of reputation retaliation when a developer doesn't like a review.
- The user profile should include the list of games developed and reviewed/rated. Any feedback or review given to other games should be shown so other users can easily browse and read the feedback/ratings.
- Allow any game, regardless of state, to be viewable from the Creator's Club web site. For example, I cannot view game details when a game is in the 'In Process' state.
Now on the longer term side, I would suggest:
- Enhance the game and premium member profile pages. The information on the current pages is sparse. Allow the developers to enhance them. I would heavily consider a member controlled cross between a wiki and blog. The pages should be easily constructed; the developer can choose widgets to display. Such widgets could include picture/video galleries, blog entries, release schedules, top reviews (though all reviews should always be accessible, in my opinion) etc. Naturally some of the information should be structured so that it can be viewed in the Xbox dashboard or in a mobile front-end (think Live Anywhere).
- Provide a source code repository system similar to SourceForge ; perhaps some form of coupling into CodePlex or MSDN's Code Gallery (without forcing projects to be open source).
- Provide an easy way to solicit help. This could evolve into a job-board style mechanism.
- Expand the Creators Club to include libraries (graphics, shader libraries, etc).
Bottom-line: I think the idea of community games is fantastic. But I would love to see the whole community be engaged more. XNA Creators Club has the potential to provide a fantastic social experience for creating games, let alone playing them.
Update: I posted the above feedback in the XNA Creators Club forums and other folks gave their feedback. The conversation, which can be seen here, spawned some additional thoughts.
