The Microsoft keynote here at the Game’s Developer’s Conference included a number of unique announcements as Microsoft prepared to democratize games’ development, granting the creative types at home the ability to create custom games using XNA tools for the Xbox 360, PC, and Zune.

Oh, and in case you haven’t heard already a Chainsaw-ready Cliffy B confirmed Gears of War 2 for release this November as well as live demonstrations for Ninja Gaiden 2 and Fable 2.

The presentation titled A Future Wide Open: Unleashing the Creative Community focused on the changes in the game's industry since presenter John Schappert (now Corporate VP of Live, Software and Services for MS) started garage programming games for the Apple II. This was a time when game development teams used to be 10 programmers, teams that are now groups of 10,000. Of course we acknowledge today's developers and their accomplishments, but looking forward John acknowledged that the creative community will dynamically impact the future of the game space.

And where do they start? Well examining 2007, Schappert acknowledge the great milestones of a huge year, and the great crop of games that pushed storytelling and design to new limits. These games drove the Live community to unlock the 1,000,000,000 billionth achievement and buy $250 million in downloadable content.

Enough with the numbers, lets get to the ‘good stuff’.

Chris Satchel, general manager of MS Developer Group, was invited on-stage to give the audience more information on the XNA initiative and how Microsoft planned to “democratize” games development.

Chris focused on the XNA development community and the results of Dream, Build, Play – a competition over four months that spawned over 200 games. In the end, they only entered four publishing agreements.  One of those was granted to James Silva’s game Dead Samurai. James was on-hand after a demo reel to not only present his game, but speak to his experience since the publishing deal with MS.

But what happened to the 196 other games that were created as entries in the Dream, Build, Play competition? Obviously, there are more creative people like James, and they can use an audience for their work. Satchel announced that community games will be distributed on Xbox Live.

Using a Create, Submit, Peer Review and Play filter, any garage programmer can get their game submitted to the 10,000,000 people on Xbox Live. The process seemed very similar to last GDC’s gem Little Big Planet’s and the Create, Share, and Play model on Sony’s Playstation Network. Each programmer will be tied to an an identity that will build their reputation as designers with each game they release. Through peer review, the best games will rise to the top.

Chris demonstrated a few titles for the service which are available right now on Xbox Live as free trials and then showed the multiplatform features of XNA. Developers who use XNA will have the ability to distribute their games on PC, 360, and Zune.