GDC: Community games for Xbox Live this year

Microsoft has just confirmed that community games made with XNA will be made available on Xbox Live this year.

Microsoft's XNA head Chris Satchell said that gamers will be free to upload games to the service within certain ground rules. Each user will have an XNA Creator Identity which wil act in the same way as a GamerTag, allowing bedroom coders to set sliders to show how violent their game is. Once self-rated, games can then be sent for peer review.

Satchell estimated that about 1,000 user-created games will be on Live before the end of the year. Demos of user-made games Jellycar, Dishwasher and other community-developed titles are now available as trial versions on Live.

The news came out of the GDC keynote from Microsoft's John Schappert.