Q&A: Microsoft's Chris Satchell on XNA Express

This week, Microsoft released XNA Game Studio Express, a free-to-use set of game-design tools for Windows, aimed at getting students and hobbyists fired up about making games.

Chris Satchell, the general manager of Microsoft's game-development group, was one of the speakers at an XNA event at the UK's University of Warwick held to publicise the toolset to academics and students. GameSpot sat down with Satchell to find out more about XNA.

GameSpot UK: You say that there's a lack of people going into computer science--why do you think that is, and what do you think can be done about it?

Chris Satchell: To a lot of people it might be that they're not sure how relevant it really is. They look at perhaps the topics and perhaps they're like, AMI, graphics, what do these things mean to me? And I think that's why gaming's really important, because it might be relevant. They get gaming--a lot of people love to play console games. So then they see why all that stuff would be useful. And I think that can help really attract people to universities, and, anecdotally, that's what we hear--as soon as universities add a heavy gaming component to a course, they will normally sell out the course, and people get really excited about it. And then when they start it, they think, "Oh! This other computer science stuff is cool, and this maths stuff, well that's pretty cool, too."

I think it's really important to get people interested because the numbers of people coming into this industry is going down and it's important to find ways to get new people in. And of course, that goal is really important long-term. If we can use gaming and XNA Express as a way of getting people excited, and help get people in to the industry, then that's a really important thing to do.

GSUK: Why do you think the passion has gone out of the industry?

CS: The big productions are cool, and they can produce things like Gears of War, which is just amazing. But--and this is almost one of my biggest peeves--the passion has been lost when it comes to one individual thinking they've got a great idea and that they can use that idea to go out and be successful, and I don't need a 200-person team and I don't need three years and $25 million to do it. If I've got a good idea, then that's enough.

And while I was growing up, me and my friends felt that passion. It's like people when they play guitar, when they first start playing they think, "Hey! I can make it big! All I've got to do is keep practising, and get good, and get a band together, and we can make it!" I think now, all that kind of enthusiasm has gone because it is just so difficult to get games out now. You do see some of it at the IGF and places like that, but how can you get more people to feel the passion?

GSUK: Do you think that programming used to be cool but now it isn't?

CS: Computer science, cool?! Well, I don't know that I'd ever have described it as cool per se, but I think what [being a hobbyist] did was get me really passionate about it--I'd already got how much fun it was to build something on a computer and have it work and be able to edit it, so it felt very natural...

And now I think because you can't build games for your console, whereas you could before for your Commodore 64, people don't do that anymore. What they do instead is go to university and they don't want to do computer science, they go and they do something else because it's more relevant to their life. So before when people were doing it at home, then they would look at courses in computer science and think it was a really kind of cool thing to do. It's like the joke--apart from the cars, the money, and the fame, we're exactly like rock stars.

GSUK: How did the idea for XNA come about?

CS: In early 2004, as we were getting ready for GDC, a lot of us had been working in professional games for a long time, and as we were talking about this theme we really started to crystallise this idea that the industry was growing and there were heaps of things happening but there were also some problems at the core of it--how hard it was to make games, how hard it was to make them for cross-platforms, and the amount of people we need in the industry to do it.

We saw that creativity was getting stifled, but that doesn't mean that there aren't brilliant people like Peter Molyneux making amazing games, but it means that it feels a bit like there are a lot of sequels. And how would we get to a point where it was easier, you could do it with less people, you could do it across platforms, and spur that creativity again.

That was really the impetus that started us and then, as we moved on, we realised that there's a lot of creativity out there and sort of developer segments that we don't really deal with a lot. We'd always dealt with the professional developers and tried to give them the very best technologies, but then we hadn't really done a lot to enable hobbyists, independent developers, emerging markets, students, and academia. Why don't we do something for them, because there's a ton of creativity there and a ton of drive to do it, how do we enable them?

And that's really where we started on this track of making Game Studio Express--to make it easier, to open up the console and let people develop. And that really started about a year ago, when we'd already been working on these technologies and we realised that we could really do something different here.

GSUK: Tell us about your personal hobbyist days.

CS: Before I owned my own computer we had Commodore PETs at my school computer club, as well as BBC Micros, and then my first computer was an Atari 800, and I just started to try and do really simple games like you know, a classic apple-catcher game, you know, a guy moving across the bottom of the screen catching falling apples, I saw one in a magazine and got really inspired by it, so I'd just try different games like that.

Then I moved up to the Commodore 64, and the ZX Spectrum, and I think it's really like music, you tend to build games that you're influenced by, so I started trying to do a scrolling shoot-'em-up game, puzzle games, and then on to the Amiga--by then I was getting into more complex games, some 3D shooter-type games, and lots of strategy and tactics games for some reason. I was always trying to make computer versions of the tactical board games. Then it was on from there to university and then I started working for professional developer studios.

GSUK: Sony has gone the opposite way to Microsoft on homebrew. It seems to actively try to block people from doing it. Why do you think it does that?

CS: With Net Yaroze, I think it was a great idea, and I think the problem with it was that people already had the game console, and then they had to go buy another, more expensive one, and it was a difficult environment. With Linux on PS2, again, you've sort of opened it up, but now it's way too difficult to do anything. You have to give people great tools to make it easy for them.

GSUK: What's your opinion on that kind of mentality?

CS: The [PlayStation Portable] homebrew is interesting, because the most excitement I ever see about the PSP is with the homebrew, and for some unknown reason Sony keep[s] trying to stop it. It's this sort of fear of the community and really what we think is you have to embrace the community, give them a way to be creative, instead of always trying to fight them.

GSUK: What are the limitations of XNA? What can't you do with it?

CS: In the initial version one of the things you can't do is networking on the 360. On the Xbox 360 we haven't got the network infrastructure done yet, but it's definitely coming. We just didn't manage to get it in version one. One limitation at the moment is that it's all managed code, not native code. Personally, I actually think that's an improvement to the development environment. You can do high-end games and you can do simple, easy games.

GSUK: What do you think's the best way to jump in with XNA?

CS: Take a starter kit and modify it. That's a really great way of getting your first thing done. That way, you'll very quickly get your first experience: It's a great way to just get started.

GSUK: What kind of stuff are you expecting to see from XNA?

CS: I think what people will do this year and early on in 2007, is very much focus more on the smaller, more casual games. The kind of things you can get on XBL arcade. But I think over time we will see people doing bigger projects with it.

GSUK: Can you make a game with XNA and sell it? Or is it all about exposure?

CS: With the Windows games, absolutely. If you wanted to sell [something you've made with XNA], go for your life.

GSUK: Finally, can you tell us what the letters "XNA" stand for?

CS: It started off standing for Cross Platform Next Generation Architecture. But really it's taken on a life of its own. Cross Platform Next Generation Architecture actually does a reasonable job, but actually we never use an expanded name, it's just XNA now, it's not an acronym.