Why do Microsoft charge so much for this? I went to try and debug a game on my 360 (I had a friends code via dreamspark last year), asked me to renew and it was £65! I could flash my drive and surely load it other ways for the price of that! Is there alternative ways to boot code?
that's pretty cheap considering other similar concepts were historically more expensive, like the NetYaroze etc. I find it very revolutionary for those who want to get into official game making.
I hear you brother, but that's still cheap versus say..developing with an official SDK on a Wii or Ps3. Sorry for being curious, are you into making games or just messing about?
Why spend the 65, you can just test the code on the PC. If you one day feel confident enough that you have something cool you can always go for the fee. Not sure how things are handeld nowadays, but when I first had a 360 right after launch I also subscribed to XNA for the 3 or was it 4 months sub to test some code and play around. But due to no time I wanted to cancle my sub after those 4 months, and this proved to be a huge pain in the ass. Calling microsoft/xbox nobody knew what the hell XNA was and how I could cancle and they didn't have any record of me having this next to my xbox live, while they were taking the amount every 4 months from my credit card and me doing chargebacks each time (this went on for at least a year before it somehow stopped and somebody woke up at MS)
I'm into actually making games, I had one last year but never got finished and decided to take a break. So I wanted to start this up again, but alas, this seems not possible atm.
The fee covers more than just allowing you to deploy your code to the Xbox. It also gets you access to some premium content on the website (if they ever get it working again) and, more importantly, lets you go through the playtest/review process to offer games on the Xbox Live Indie Games and Windows Phone Marketplace services. Unless you are playing around with avatars (no PC-side API support), there is really nothing that you cannot do on the PC for free.
I would say debug on a PC, then when you think it's up to scratch port it. Grab yourself a wired controller or the 360 wireless dongle and you're away!
