Console game development for the masses

NY Times: “[T]he development kits needed to create games for the consoles made by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo cost thousands of dollars, and those companies usually send the kits only to established producers.Microsoft is trying to change that. Today the company is expected to announce the fall release of a product called XNA Game Studio Express, a basic version of the company’s game authoring tools that will let aspiring designers write games on a PC and test them on an ordinary Xbox 360. To test games, the designer pays $99 a year to translate the game from the PC into the Xbox format.”