And no, they aren't copying the Wii. XNA is a game-creating program and from the release of it they had plans to bring these games to the Xbox. If anything, Wii saw this and "copied" the 360 before they got a chance to release their's.

Now that the Wii fanboys have been told off... This will be a similar system to XBLA. But, users upload their video games, and peers review it and such and play. Some demos are already out for free to download of games. There isn't news as to if these games will be free or not (but since it's Microsoft...).

Nothing too fancy except for the announcement of it here:
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/853/853363p1.html

10:55 - 11:03

But it costs 50 ****ing dollars a month. I checked.

This isn't at all the same thing as Wii Ware. The XBox Live Arcade, which has been there from the start, is basically their version of Wii Ware (original games available for purchase online). Wii Ware games are not user-created and uploaded for review. And XNA is just the development tools which have been available for awhile for download. The ability to upload your games is a recent service.

There is no Wii equivalent to XNA. Nintendo does not offer a software suite for Wii Ware game development to the general public.

Poor Sovieto. Fighting with imaginary fanboys.

okay but im talking about the actual service in this thread... obviously. are you trying to counter my post or something?

2 failures in 1 thread?

thats to be in the creators club, and its 100/year i think.

Not really, just trying to clarify some mix ups in what each piece is. The thread title, "360's WiiWare Announced" is misleading since the Xbox equivalent to Wii Ware would be Xbox Live Arcade which is not new.

There is no Wii equivalent to the new Xbox service where games developed by regular people using XNA are available. There's is no Wii equivalent to XNA either.

garage developers can make games for wiiware, wasnt that the whole point of it? but yes they arent the only ones.

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Thats gonna be the first game I buy off it yo. To tell you the truth, im not really all that excited about both WiiWare and XNA. Both cost money, i dont care how much it is money is money, and I am gonna be so short on cash this year its not even going to be funny. I need those precious ones and fives so i can buy BURGER KING AND JELLY BEANS!!!

No more than it was originally for XBLA. It's a lower cost of entry, and Nintendo will be your publisher so you don't have to hunt one down, but not needing a publisher was a selling point for original XBLA titles as well (even though they're now telling some indies they should get a publisher first). Smaller companies could get games on, but hobbyists won't.

WiiWare copied XBLA, not XNA. It would be nice for them to put together a system like XNA for WiiWare, but it hasn't been done yet.

It's not quite so simple. You can't go to Nintendo.com and download a WiiWare development system. "Garage developers" in this sense means smaller developer companies who don't have the massive resources of an EA or Activision. You still need to go through the proper channels at Nintendo to get the things you need for WiiWare development.

XNA you can download right now, here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937795.aspx
There's no fee at all to use it for developing Windows games. There is a subscription fee if you want to run your games on the 360 and submit them to the new Xbox Live Community Games service.