In the face of escalating game development costs, expanding teams and ever more complex hardware technologies, Microsoft Corp. today delivered a pre-release version of the first XNA™ Studio tools and unveiled the XNA Framework to attendees of the Game Developers Conference 2006 in San Jose. Microsoft also announced that the company is opening its Xbox Live® Server Platform to game developers and publishers, allowing them to innovate and extend the Xbox Live experience in their titles.

XNA Studio represents a set of tools and technologies Microsoft is building to help streamline and optimize the game development process.

“Developers need a better way to make games and manage the production process,” said Chris Satchell, general manager of the Game Developer Group at Microsoft. “XNA Studio enables all developers — from major development studios to the two guys moonlighting on a dream project in their garage or dorm room — to create games in new, more efficient ways.”

This community technology preview (CTP) represents the first public opportunity for game developers to get their hands on key components of XNA Studio. Included in the CTP is a pre-release version of XNA Build, which delivers mechanisms for orchestrating, debugging and optimizing the game build pipeline. XNA Build also provides studios with a foundation that helps them easily identify game asset relationships and dependency information to unlock a wealth of benefits, ranging from incremental content builds to assistance in identifying orphaned or unused content. Tools such as XNA Build enable game developers to spend less time building and maintaining their internal tools infrastructure, and more time creating great game experiences.