Let's hold our horses on the speculation here and focus on facts.
I guess this will come when the next big firmware update is comming, so i guess around christmas '08.
ya, according to MS, the "official" deadline is sometime in late 2008
You have misinterpreted something here. The final release for XNA GS 3.0 is indeed the "holiday 2008" season. However they have
never mentioned purchasing games. In fact in one of the Channel 9 videos featuring Michael Klucher (Program Manager on the XNA team), it was said (specifically addressing a question of how will consumers get these Zune games) that the release of Zune support in 3.0 is intended as a
developer release and that users should not expect to be able to download these games without developer tools. Of course we might all be pleasantly surprised come the end of the year, but fact is that the only stated plans were to have a developer oriented (not consumer oriented) release.
I anticipate that the "complete" version of the Creators Club online
site will let you submit and download games from 3 different platforms
(compatable Zunes being one of them).
It's possible, but I wouldn't hold your breath. They've still got a long ways to go just to get the Xbox side of that completed. While we can all guess that they will someday add Windows and Zune to the Community Games, I would be highly surprised if they do all three platforms this year. Again, the final release of 3.0 (in terms of Zune support) was stated to be geared towards developers; not consumers. Also remember that it took them two years to get to distributing XNA games to Xbox 360 consumers, so there is no precedent set to imply that the Zune will be a quick process. These things take a long time due to not only the technical troubles, but the financial, political, and legal issues involved as well.
Again, we can all hope for a good distribution model this year, but I believe the facts point to that being a rather unlikely scenario.
Nick Gravelyn -- Microsoft XNA MVP -- http://nick.gravelyn.com/zune-games/
