For any of you out there who are hardcore gamers this is old news. For the rest of you this might not even be important but Microsoft is planning on releasing there development kits to the general public.

I will admit that there are clearly mixed reaction about this move by gamers. Many still have a sour taste in their mouths about Microsoft in general and view any move by them as them trying to secure yet another market to Bill's psuedo-monopoly. Many more view it as an admission of failure to create quality games and secure quality titles for their platform.

I view it as the first step towards reintroducing competition to the gaming industry. Anybody should be able to make Xbox, Playstation or Wii games, the hard part should be finding a publisher to push your game to the masses. We shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel every single time, the game engines should be available if not immediately after a set period of time.

Production costs are at an all time high. It has gotten to the point where we rarely see original games rather than time honored sequels. We will see a new Final Fantasy, Tekken 6 and Metal Gear 4, the question is if we will see anything new or original. The risks have gotten to be far to great, like the movie industry, to take risks. Its better to make the nteenth sequel and garuntee X sales than to make an original game and maybe get no sales.

Microsoft's new strategy will have every would be programer pushing out games. Sure there will be a lot of horrible games that nobody will buy as a result of this. I hope it will bring back the old days of Playstation, Genesis and Super Nintendo where producers made games they liked. Not all of them were good but they kept trying and sometimes something good stuck.

What do you think?