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A new game development platform from Microsoft allows anyone to create games for its Xbox 360 console, the company said today.

Typically, console games are designed by large studios that must pay high prices to buy development kits in order to write games for consoles. Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express is a new development kit that will be released in beta form in August. It will be available for free to anyone using a Windows XP PC. The kit is designed for game developer novices as well as studios, Microsoft said.

Users will have the option of joining a developers group for $99 per year in which they can share and test their games with other designers and access information that could help them speed up the development process.

School Days

More than ten universities, including the University of Southern California, Georgia Tech College of Computing, and Southern Methodist University Guildhall, will include the new platform in the curricula of their game development schools, according to Microsoft.

The software giant has also worked with games software development tool companies to ensure that their tools can be used within the new platform. Autodesk, a provider of 3-D authoring software, and GarageGames, a maker of games development software, both said that their technologies can be ported to the XNA Game Studio Express platform.

The XNA Game Studio Express development environment is based on Visual Studio Express and .NET, and allows developers to create games simultaneously for Xbox 360 and Windows XP.

Microsoft expects the final non-beta version of the development platform to become available by the end of the year. Another version of XNA Game Studio Express designed for professional game developers will become available in early 2007, the company said.

The Xbox 360 is the second version of the Xbox console, which started selling late last year.