Following the practice of previous articles, this section discusses the aspects of game development, distribution and the infrastructure Microsoft built to complement them.
Development ecosystem
The development follows the semicentennial tradition where the manufacturer offers game studios cutting-edge development kits and libraries in exchange for a hefty fee. Additionally, with the advent of small companies venturing into the video game business, a new category of 'Indy' game developers emerged to define those game studios that share the same enthusiasms and/or talent but are obliged to work on a smaller budget.
As a consequence, Microsoft marketed two types of development kits :
- Traditional game studios paying a full license would have access to the official Xbox Development Kit or 'XDK'. This pack includes the entire SDK, many types of development hardware and, depending on their relationship with Microsoft, even prototypes.
- Indy studios were offered an alternative suite called Microsoft XNA, which includes similar development hardware but a different SDK called 'XNA'.
To provide more resources, Microsoft deployed the Game Developer Network (GDN) and the XNA Creators Club, two online portals where developers would have access to more documentation and tools.
Available tools and kits
Those using the expensive XDK will see it follows the footsteps of its predecessor. The APIs provided are largely based on DirectX's routines to ease the learning curve for PC developers already familiar with DirectX on the Windows platform. XDK implements DirectX version 9.0c (identified as '9_3') extended with Xbox-unique features.
All in all, the suite includes a variety of libraries and tools, for instance:
- Existing front-end Visual C and C++ 2005 compilers (Microsoft's variant of C and C++), along with a new backend that generates PowerPC machine code. There are also PowerPC, xvs_3_0 and xps_3_0 assemblers (the latter two are Xenos' microcode shader languages ). The front-end compilers were later updated to the 2010 version.
- Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 as IDE. Later versions of XDK shipped with the 2008 version and, finally, the 2010 one.
- Debuggers for the Xbox 360 Development Kit.
- The well-known Direct3D API for graphics. Although it's hardly a replica of the Windows version. For example, the shader compiler now generates microcode at compile-time, unlike Windows' edition where it's done at runtime (as Windows games must support a multitude of graphics cards). The APIs have also been extended to accommodate Procedural Synthesis, Predicated Tiling and many more cases. These have been documented by the Xenia emulator's development team .
- Familiar functions from Windows 2000's Win32 API, now targeting the Xbox 360's Kernel, such as the
CreateThread()routine for multi-threading operations. - Old but soon-to-be-replaced APIs like DirectSound which, as seen in further revisions of the XDK, was soon succeeded with XAudio2. The latter was developed to take advantage of the unique features of the Xbox 360 and to unify the syntax with Windows's DirectX APIs.
- Other non-DirectX APIs like the Natural User Interface to operate Kinect; and Xbox 360 Unified Storage to abstract the large number of storage media available.
Now, for the budget studios using XNA. Well, the latter was designed to facilitate cross-platform development for Windows XP and the Xbox 360 . XNA worked as a wrapper of DirectX, so low-level functions were abstracted by routines that work on both Windows and the Xbox 360. Even though additional code is still needed to accommodate the small discrepancies between the two unequal platforms , the platform benefited many developers that were looking to port their games to the Xbox 360 without a lot of effort or cost. For those who are familiar with Windows' development ecosystem, XNA is a successor of the old 'Managed DirectX' platform, which includes a subset of the .NET Compact Framework .
Later years will see new versions of the XNA framework supporting new devices (like Windows Phone 7) but slowly distancing itself away from the now-obsolete Xbox 360 hardware, until Microsoft abandoned XNA altogether in 2013 .
As a final note, for homebrew developers, libXenon is a free third-party library that provides low-level access to the hardware without copyright restrictions , although its executables can only be run from a hacked Xbox 360 with signatures verification disabled.
Storage medium
Let's now see how the distribution of content worked.
Retail games
Example of retail game.
It may sound hard to believe, but for Microsoft, the same dual-layer DVD disc used for the original Xbox worked fine for their new console. I presume it was another cost-effective strategy, as the DVD disc got cheaper to produce and its readers could be outsourced to the most inexpensive and convenient manufacturer. Throughout the console's lifespan, Microsoft had relied on Hitachi, LG, Toshiba, Samsung, Philips, BenQ and Lite-ON - including teams of two - to produce their DVD drives.
As a reminder, dual-layer DVDs (also called DVD-9) have a theoretical capacity of 8.5 GB. A big advantage compared to the new blue-lasered discs of the PlayStation 3, is that the Xbox 360 enjoys greater read speeds thanks to its 12x drive, another reason to expel the hard drive from the requirements.
On the other side, games were greatly constrained by the usable capacity, those 8.5 GB were further limited by a secure filesystem called Xbox Game Disc 2 or 'XGD2'. This was Microsoft's successor of the original format employed to prevent unauthorised copies. The actual available size for games was down to 6.8 GB (80% of the total capacity) . In 2011, after many third-party tools managed to crack the protection, Xbox Game Disc 3 or 'XGD3' was made available to developers. In it, Microsoft managed to revamp the security tricks and reduce the space reserved for anti-piracy mechanisms, leaving a total of 7.9 GB for games.
Online store
Example of store listing.
A new emerging space that Microsoft began experimenting with, until it became a full-blown competitor to retail stores, was the online marketplace.
Originally named Xbox Live Marketplace, this portal arrived in 2006 as a new Blade/category called 'Marketplace' in the original dashboard . Users would then find a subset of retail games to purchase and free demos to try out. In later months, a further update added a new group called 'Arcade' which encompassed games, often small, exclusively found in the online store. As time went by, more updates would arrive to expand the territory of the Xbox Live Marketplace, which now sells TV episodes, movies and original Xbox games as well.
Moreover, in another update, Microsoft promoted a dedicated section for indie developers, this was called 'Xbox Live Community Games' and separated those developers using the XNA platform from the big studios already possessing retail space.
In the final years of the Xbox 360 and the consolidation of other media platforms (smartphones, smart TVs, the Xbox One and online streaming), Microsoft rebranded part of the marketplace to offer content available to use from other devices (that weren't necessarily an Xbox 360).
The Blu-ray competitor
The HD DVD player, released on November 2006.
Not so much related to games, but the film industry had an unusual influence on this console too (or maybe the other way around? we'll soon see). As Microsoft imposed the DVD for games, the company was also pushing a new format that could compete with the Blu-Ray for space on the movie shelves. I'm talking about the HD-DVD which, conveniently enough, uses Microsoft-owned API for interactive features (menus and such).
Thus, Microsoft's goal lead to a separate accessory called Xbox 360 HD DVD Player, an external reader placed next to the console and requires its own power supply (so expect all the annoyances that come with it). Anyway, the reader connected through USB and shipped with an 'HD DVD installation disc' that installed an additional media player on the console. Although, its behaviour differs depending on the Dashboard version: on the Blades Dashboard, the HD-DVD player integrated itself with the UI . On newer dashboards, it showed up as a separate app .
Internally, HD DVD stores pits and lands at a higher density than conventional DVDs, allowing it to store up to 15 GB of data if single-layered or 30 GB if dual-layered. While both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD rely on blue-light diodes, the latter exhibits a sparser distribution of pits; and the focal point of its laser is larger than the Blu-ray's . Consequently, HD-DVDs can't reach the competitor's 25 GB/50 GB milestone.
After only two years sitting on shelves, both HD-DVDs and the player were phased out in 2008 . If you ask me, this duality between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was just a battle of royalties, manufacturing costs and disagreement between distributors. None of which mattered to the end-user, and yet they had to pay the high price for an experimental technology that would soon be rendered 'not worth it' by distributors.
Network service
At the heart of this low-priced console was its highly-promoted online capabilities, which materialised in the form of a paid subscription service called Xbox Live (the name also encompasses the marketplace, software updates and other internet-based services).
As Xbox Live enjoyed successful adoption with the original Xbox, the successor would be no stranger in following the footsteps and even offer more commodities to get users to join online gaming. I presume the low-price point of this console and continuous marketing efforts - including all the accessories that Microsoft shipped (webcams, headsets, etc) - meant that Microsoft's main source of profit relied on paid subscriptions and marketplace purchases. With the advent of 3D avatars, the company also found ways to capitalise on avatar customisation .
Curiously enough, the console calculated a score for the user's Xbox Live profile which was based on the number and type of achievements unlocked. Want to reach the top ranks? Play more. Ran out of games? Buy more!
From the developer's point of view, Xbox Live servers provided the infrastructure required for multi-playing, voice chat, profile management and so on. Xbox 360 games used a REST API (documented on the SDK) to talk with each endpoint. To authenticate with those servers, developers received a custom 'Xbox Secure Token Service' to be embedded with their REST requests.