Competition(?) on the Windows Phone Marketplace

Last week or so, I started hearing around the blogosphere that Microsoft itself was going to be putting games out for Windows Phone 7. At first I was a bit miffed about this, because it meant that right out of the gate, this market for indie developers -- which is how I see this field -- was going to be crowded by the "big guy". I knew, of course, that there were small game studios out there, currently developing for iPhone and/or Android, that were going to be getting into the Windows Phone market, but they were "acceptable competition" in my mind.

After thinking about it, though, I decided that the game industry itself has done fine with the AAA developers and the indies alike (as has been the general theme over at Game Theory Online and The Escapist's Extra Credit feature), room for both. Yay!


But then I read tonight about Microsoft's continued focus on games for Windows Phone 7 and their support for many other existing XBox Live developers, and my heart sank again. It's not clear that they'll all be there on day one, or if they're all just in-development, but even though I've never seen any of these games (not being an Xbox 360 owner), you know that they can't suck if they're mentioned in this article.

Is there room for someone like me to even try? I've never published a game before, I'm new to XNA, and while I like to think I've got lots of game ideas, I have no idea what they'll be like if/when they materialize. Obviously there will be opportunity for many indie developers to make their mark in the Windows Phone marketplace, perhaps because of that next novel game concept, or perhaps because the price point on these "professional" games will leave a second price tier - the $0.99/$1.99 level? This is probably where I was going to end up anyway, so am I again worrying for no reason?

Should I just consider the app market instead of the game market?


Of course, at the rate that I'm accomplishing anything in Silverlight *or* XNA, this might be a non-issue. All these rumours of November release, then October... I had wanted to have made *something*, no matter how trivial, before the phone was available. That time sure seems to be approaching fast, and I'm still in learning mode.

Silverlight progress

I've put the XNA programming aside for now, moving on from samples and examples to trying to get an honest-to-goodness app finished and running. To do this, I'm leveraging libraries written by others, something that I find hard to do because I rather enjoy the process of implementing the same code myself.

But, time is of the essence, since I don't have many hours a week that's mine for WP7 projects, and thus it makes sense to not re-invent an internet-available wheel. Of course, I'm completely new to Silverlight, having at most run downloaded WP7 samples and read a few book excerpts. This means I really have no idea how to use other Silverlight controls in my own or how to include other C# projects in a Silverlight project.

I thought the first was easy enough to figure out -- even though I'm pretty new to Visual Studio (again), I know how to include references to other projects, and Silverlight does it the same way. But no, not really. And including an existing C# library in Silverlight doesn't work the same way. Only certain project types are able to be included in this way, and this one library isn't one. So as not to waste time (YET AGAIN) fighting with tools instead of developing, I've just copied the code from these downloaded libraries and controls into my own project, and am now fighting with dependencies that are expected from "full" environments but aren't available in the Windows Phone restricted set of APIs.

At this rate, I might end up coding these libraries myself, after all.