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Saturday, April 12, 2008

Sony PlayStation 3 is inviting trouble with mod support, says XNA boss


Chris Satchell, XNA group manager at Microsoft, has said that companies like Sony, Nintendo and Apple are "inviting trouble" if they don't have XNA-style security measures in place to protect against malicious user-generated content.
"I think there's a potential risk on any platform where you're allowing...where you're running in what we call native mode, where you're writing straight to the metal, not a sandbox layer like XNA, and then that runs a script engine and you let people do that in that script engine,"
Satchell told Eurogamer in an interview published today.
"Any platform that let's you do that, and doesn't have the right security measures in place - whether it's Sony, whether it's Nintendo, whether it's Apple, whether it's anyone - you're inviting trouble, because sooner or later someone will want to prove they can do it,"
he added.

Satchell was responding to a question about whether the peer-review system used to help weed out inappropriate content in XNA community games could be put to other use. He admits it could be, but obviously mod support isn't on the immediate agenda.

The XNA group's boss also talked about the possibility of XNA community games being allowed to use Achievements, saying that Microsoft will "need to see how the community works" before making a decision.

Source: Games Industry