Announced today, through what is called the DreamSpark program, as many as 1 billion high school and college students alike will be given access to Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition and XNA Game Studio 2.0.

The students are also eligible for a free 12-month academic membership to the XNA Creators Club; so long as their studies include technology, design, math science and engineering.

As of now, it’s only available to college students in the U.S., Canada, China, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K.

The plan is to extend the project to high school students and students in Australia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Japan, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Asia and Europe, by Q3 2008.

I see this initiative as an intelligent way to capture quite a bit of game talent that may potentially end up on XBLA. If all 1 billion attempt to make a game and 95% is pure dogshit, there’s still the potential for 5% really innovative, creative games akin to Everyday Shooter, Crayon Physics and Audiosurf.

Let’s just hope this comes to fruition, the 360 is badly in need of indie titles on XBLA.

Source: Microsoft

Our thanks go to Leathersoup.

Tags: visual_studio_2005, xna_creators_club

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2 Comments » Leathersoup on February 19, 2008 5:16 pm Strange that Canada isn’t one of the included countries. Chad Lakkis on February 19, 2008 7:17 pm Thanks for the catch Leathersoup. That was a mistake on our part. Canada is included, and the article has been updated. Chad- RSS feed for comments on this post. Comment Now Note: Commenting on Ripten does not currently require registration, however to be eligible for contests on the site, you must be a registered user. Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Commenting Rules: No hate speech allowed. If you must argue, please debate intelligently. Comments containing selected keywords or outbound links will be put into moderation to help prevent spam. Ripten reserves the right to delete comments and ban anyone who doesn't follow the rules. Thanks. Notify me of followup comments Tired of the Goomba? Upload your own custom comment avatar.