Microsoft Becoming TV Producer?

From Wonderland is this post about a new contest to win a $100 K production budget for an Xbox Live six episode series. Pilots of five to fifteen minutes (live-action or animated or mixed) can be submitted by June 29th (with a $25 processing fee). The whole contest is in conjunction with the New York Television Festival where the winner will be screened (finalists will be shown on Xbox Live Marketplace).

I wonder when Valve will do the same with Steam? I wonder how much potential ad revenue there is for something like this to a company like Microsoft?

RoboBlitz Postmortem

Gamasutra has an excellent RoboBlitz postmortem article. It delves into the details of the development cycle for this indie game with some interesting facts.

• game development was self-funded by Naked Sky
• they blew all their money and had to borrow some to cover their costs
• they had to make the game under 50 Mb to meet Xbox Live distribution requirements
  
• it uses both the Unreal Engine 3 and the proFX engine for procedural textures
• it only took 12 people 11 months to produce

The most interesting fact to me is that 80% of the textures for each level at generated at load time, thereby reducing the total size of the game, and allowing for a larger set of textures to paint their 19 levels with. (See previous post on procedural textures and animation). This fact alone may have enormous repercussions in game development, and hopefully machinima.