Of all of the excitement around the NXE,  Netflix and the Avatars got the lion share of the attention.

However, while both are great features, the real killer feature of NXE is actually the Community Games.

See http://www.gamerbytes.com/2008/11/xna_preview_what_youll_be_play.php

Microsoft is launching 30 new games typically priced $2.50-$5.00 that are built by the XNA developer community and are governed by community peer review rather than by Microsoft.

30 new games launched in one day. 30 new games! 30 NEW GAMES!

Do you get it? Do you understand what it means?

This is the YouTube of games. A new massive distribution channel for small time developers working weekends and nights at home chasing their gaming dream. A channel where they can tap into a large market of dedicated gaming audiance and have an easy way to monitize.

For us gamers it means an endless stream of new games very inexpensively, with a demo for each. Yes, many will be crap but some will turn out to be killer gems. 

For Microsoft tt means hundreds if not thousands of new 360 exclusives and a thriving community of thousands of developers dedicated to the platform.  Something that will be very hard for anyone else to replicate.

While it is not apparent now, we may be looking two years from now backwards and realize that the most distiguishing feature of the 360 are all these thousands of community games.

I'm seriously interested in making my own game with the XNA.

I've been using The Games Factory for so long now, I think it's would be time to move on to ''real'' programming! Knowing that you can even make a little bit of money out of your games, I'm all for it!

Might we see another Braid quality title out of community games though? Only time will tell!