Xbox 360 Fanboy

Microsoft has revealed the marketing and pricing plans for its Xbox Live Community Games program, which is expected to launch in some public form this holiday season in North America and select European markets.

Microsoft has set three tiers of pricing for XNA developed titles, games may cost 200MS points ($2.50) for titles 50MB or less and 400 ($5) or 800MS points ($10) for titles that weigh in at a maximum of 150MB.

Microsoft is set to share up to 70% of profits from any XNA developed title. Microsoft has also revealed plans to help promote the more successful titles on the service. "If we help you sell an absolute ton of these, it's going to be up towards 30% [more of your total revenue]," Microsoft chief technology officer Chris Satchell told MTV Multiplayer. "If it's not doing so well, down towards 10%."

As Shacknews described, developers who choose to distribute titles via the Xbox Live Marketplace will not be able to opt out of royalty-cutting promotions. Creators must first agree to a common set of terms when adding a game to the service and, According to Microsoft, "the majority of sales and revenue a creator earns will be generated by our promotions."

Unfortunately, XNA Community Games will not include achievements and the service is structured so no game may be released for free, but we assume we'll see demos for each title.

After being announced at GDC 08 the only questioned that lingered about Microsoft's new Community Games initiative was when the program would officially begin. Today Microsoft inched the program closer to launch by announcing the Beta test for Community Games is available to premium XNA membership owners and the new XNA Creators Club Online community site.

The beta allows creators to submit games for review to the newly formed creators site and once reviewed and approved the game is made available on Xbox Live.

According to Microsoft during GDC, Community Games will land on all Xbox Live connected consoles this holiday season and hopefully the early beta means we can have a healthy catalog of titles to choose from.

Make sure to check out the XNA Community Games tutorial video after the jump.

Today, as we churned through February's NPD numbers, we came across an interesting number that was included as part of Microsoft's NPD press release. The magic number is 750,000 and it's the number of times the seven free XNA games were downloaded the week after GDC. Microsoft's internal estimates peg the seven XNA games (including gems like Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, JellyCar and Little Gamers) were downloaded around 750,000 times over Xbox Live and, by our internal calculations, that sounds like a lot! Hopefully the exposure these downloads received not only got gamers excited for their release, but excited for the big XNA community games rollout later this Fall. Bring on the free XNA goodness already, bring it!

Keep this one on the down-low, we mean don't go putting this on the internets or anything but it looks like someone at Microsoft forgot to hit the "off" switch on the XNA demo for The Dishwasher - Dead Samurai.

Set to expire at midnight on March 9, we found that the demo still booted up and worked correctly today -- March 10. Still having the demo on our hard drive, we attempting to boot the game when a screen told us that the demo had expired, but oddly continued to the main menu of the the game.

The Dishwasher - Dead Samurai, created solely by James Silva, was heralded by Microsoft as their main attraction for the upcoming XNA Community Games feature, set to release this holiday. While we expect Microsoft has already noticed, they can see what you're playing you know, we at least can give the fantastic demo for the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade release a final farewell. Video of the demo going through after the jump.

At this time we haven't been able to confirm if all XNA demos are still functioning, but it seems likely that they will.