Mateusz, Lenny, thanks for the comments.
Update: Reader Mateusz points out that there is an effort under way to port the XNA frameworks to other platforms using Mono. It’s great to see what the subversive, creative types come up with all on their own. It would be hilarious if PS3 owners could run XNA games by simply booting Linux. Take that, Redmond! Welcome to our social. LMAO!
My own take is that Sony is taking a laissez-faire approach, a la Franklin D. Roosevelt and the economy: let’s provide the tools, and whatever happens, happens. Let the market take it where it may. (I hope I am not embarrassing Mrs. Freite, my history teacher in high school, by mixing my economic strategies and presidents.)
While that is great, I think they could be a bit more proactive. They could encourage garage game development with the PS3 Linux project, by marketing it as such. A program like the old PSX Net Yaroze, but with PS3s and Linux, could attract some great talent. (See? Sony has been thinking about this garage developer thing for quite a long time.)
IBM and Toshiba see this as another marketing venue for the Power processor line, especially the work on the Cell Engine that they did. Toshiba only promotes Cell within its embedded processor market, not putting an oar in to help with the garage developer thing. IBM is a bit more active, but only within their established promotional circles: developerWorks and alphaWorks. And it is hardly a big push.
Microsoft is, of course, going all out, promoting XNA as a garage developer’s haven, especially generating excitement with the possibility of garage developers selling games on XBox Live Marketplace for both PC and XBox360. In my opinion, MS is doing a better job at pushing their ideas.
It’s like IBM and Sony don’t quite see what it is they have to do, having just provided the tools and sitting back to see what develops. While it’s great they’re not stirring the pot too much, the stew is gonna ruin if there’s no cook minding the stove.
OK, that’s enough analogies for today. Thanks for keeping the conversation going, guys. Comment away, and let’s keep talking. Anyone else have any thoughts to share?
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..at the moment… all I can think of is.. HEROES wheeeeeeeee… hey!! there’s this new gal called Hana (hotter than Alias btw :P), her superpowers are technology related so I think is fair that we mention her here 😀
LOL, alright Lenny. If it’s technology related, I guess it’s OK. 😀
My BitTorrent download of Heroes episode 12, has 58 minutes to go before I can watch. I started it about 10 hours ago, while having breakfast!
hahaha… I had mine like in two hours. But GOSH!! did I try a lot of them!! Gr8 EP as always … glad that things are back to normal with our weekly dose phewww 😀
Mono.XNA is still in early stage of development, but some simple examples from XNA are working now
Porting XNA games to Mono.XNA will be easy but not automatic – there are several problems with automatic conversion between DirectX and OpenGL standards.
btw. I really like XNA and I’m developing few simple games using XNA 😉