Microsoft is going to let home brew developers make and deploy games for Xbox Live! How awesome is that?
Microsoft will provide the software for free, and you can use C# to write games that can target the Xbox 360 and the PC. If you want to share your game, it'll cost you $99, but eventually, developers will be able to sell their games through Xbox Live Arcade.
Links to the news:
This is a great move, and bound to generate hundreds of fun games that would never be made by a commercial game studio. Very cool, Microsoft!
Update on the tools and things you can do.
How many versions of pong do you think we will see when this launches?
Dude, it'll be pong with shaders!
Anyways, it's launched! I downloaded it and installed it, but haven't tried any demos yet.