Microsoft XNA (no, that's not an acronym, it's a load of crap) is the toolset which Microsoft is pushing for development of Windows and Xbox 360 games, providing game developers with a common standard to allow them to not have to worry about the "nuts and bolts boilerplate coding."

As well as giving this platform to developers, Microsoft has recently flung open the doors to homebrew developers on the PC and - critically - the Xbox 360. This will allow the bedroom coder crowd to develop on XNA.

But will they? I don't think so. The mod community which has been around since the days of Quake, and which exploded after the release of Half-Life in 1998, is much better at taking a complex developed game (we'll call it a platform) and reshaping it, rather than designing something from the ground up.

Generally speaking the amateur game developers who have designed their products from the ground up have suffered greatly in terms of what they finally manage to produce. Having to worry about everything from the game engine up costs mainstream developers a lot of time and money, and for amateur developers it can be a prolonged nightmare.

This is even so for mainstream developers - most developers simply buy a third party engine to run their games, essentially making them more professional mod squads. The Doom and Unreal engines are the current big wigs, and before that you couldn't fire up a World War II shooter that wasn't made in the Quake III engine.

Microsoft is throwing open its platform to allow for development, but in reality I think that it will be developers who will be messing around with XNA, not modders. Mod squads are at their most successful taking a game like Half-Life 2 and twisting it around to their ends.