Microsoft’s Peter Moore famously introduced XNA as the “first step of creating a YouTube for videogames.” In the 3/8 1UP podcast, they said:

“XNA isn’t the YouTube of gaming, you have to work too hard.”

Bingo!

What I like about LittleBigPlanet, is regular people can realistically create mini-games. In the past there were products like RPG-Maker and Fighter-Maker, but those products were never very good. I really hope this game building genre gets fleshed out with more quality products.

The hurdle for indie games isn’t so much marketing or distribution, but actual development.

A quick summary of easy to hard approaches for hobbyist and indie developers:

• Easy User Created Content or end-user game builder products like LittleBigPlanet and RPG-Maker
• Medium Very simple games. Macromedia Flash is probably the major platform here, but many titles are done on other platforms such as C, Java, and .NET.
• Hard Advanced general purpose game engines. XNA is getting a lot of attention, but there is also Torque, TV3D, jME, and dozens of other PC centric engines. These are really high quality and powerful tools, but they require huge time and skill investments. This often crosses the line for most hobbyists from fun to work and from a practical hobby to a impractical pipe dream.