Digital puppetry on the X-Box?

Microsoft announced yesterday that XNA Game Studio Express, which lets aspiring developers work towards creating Xbox 360 games, is available for download on the XNA development environment home page. At the moment the software is beta and it will only let developers build Windows binaries, but Microsoft is promising that games can be migrated to the 360 console by Christmas (more info is available at Playfuls.com).

Of course when I heard this I immediately thought about how cool would it be to have someone develop a digital puppetry platform using the X-Box 360? Recently Atari founder Nolan Bushnell gave a speech to the video game industry and said "I believe that in the next five years, there will be a movie that will make over $100 million that will be made by three people" (sorry, I can't find a relevant link for proper attribution).

I think he's right and considering what a fantastic console the X-Box 360 is if you don't need to know C++ to make software for the X-Box and Microsoft does this right, things could get very interesting for Machinima and digital puppetry very fast.

Thanks to C.B. for the heads-up about this!