As production costs rose up there were fewer and fewer companies making movies. Small studios just couldn’t keep up with the “big boys”, paying expensive actors, shooting on exotic locations and integrating all those cool looking special effects.

Along the way the quality of movies went down too. Since the damn thing costs so much, nobody wants to gamble with a huge investment and we usually get either a sequel or a “by the book” release that brings nothing new to the table. The movie industry is in a sad state at the moment and we have yet to see how if ever will it recover.

Up until recently, it looked like the same thing is going to happen to the gaming industry. The times when a single developer or a small team of friends in a “garage” could build an AAA title are long gone. Modern games cost as much as modern movies and as a consequence we get the same kind of crap – rehashed ideas and boring sequels. The bar is just too high for a small developer let alone a hobbyist.

Not any more. In a relatively surprising move, Microsoft has announced and even started shipping a beta of the XNA Studio Express. Not only is the product free, is based on an already impressive Visual Studio Express line of products, but with it comes what appears to be a very decent API, XNA Framework. Even better, the games produced by XNA Studio Express should run on the PC but also on Xbox 360!

This post on the XNA Team Blog goes into more details on the XNA Framework. The talk is quite high-level so anyone can follow the material.

Great news for small development houses, hobbyists and consumers alike – we should see a lot more original titles, some of which might even not suck. Kudos to Microsoft for lowering the bar for game production and leading by example.