Last month, CNN had a story about Steve Demeter's smash hit iPhone puzzle game, Trism: Developer Strikes it rich with iPhone game.

The story focused on how Apple enables developers to create games for the iPhone and that Demeter's success, which has led to him quitting his job and starting his own company, was thanks to that.

"Demeter took his crack after attending an iPhone conference in the summer of 2007"

"I did the game myself."

Sounds like one of us, right?

But this is the quote that really got my attention:

"the iPhone and the App Store have helped democratize game development by opening the field to any software coder with talent and a clever idea"

I kept waiting for the article to mention XNA Studio after that. But they never did.

XNA Studio is Microsoft's free game development tool that's been around for a few years. It's newest version, 3.0, was released in late October and in addition to allowing you to develop XBox and Windows games, version 3.0 lets you create games for the Zune as well.

The best resource for XNA v3.0 is Microsoft's XNA Creators Club Online.

I think the fact that you can get Visual Studio Express for free and XNA Studio for free and develop games for the XBox and for the Zune democratizes the playing field pretty well. There is one little catch which is that XNA Studio targets C# developers more easily but VB developers can use it as well. Chris Williams is a VB developer who does a lot of development with XNA Studio and writes about it as well as presenting at user groups and code camps.