Is It Possible For Hobbyists To Develop Games For The Xbox 360?

Yes. Microsoft has made available the XNA Developers Kit which permits the creation of games on both the PC and Xbox 360. It requires Xbox 360 users to have a hard drive and a subscription to the Microsoft Creators Club, however. At the moment, the XNA framework can not be used to create commercial games. A professional version of the product, which will permit the creation of commercial games, is due to be released in 2007. Sharing games developed using the framework will only be possible with other users who also have a subscription to the Creators Club. This may change in future, however.

The XNA framework is designed to allow programmers to develop both PC and Xbox 360 games using an almost identical codebase. It permits the creation of fully-featured games with sound and 3D graphics, though, at the time of release, no Xbox 360 networking facilities were available to developers.