Networked storage for XNA / XBLIG games on Xbox Live

I suggested this on the Creators Club forums a long time ago but thought I'd post this after some people on twitter said I should:

Basically what I'd like to see happen in the future is the addition of some sort of networked storage on Xbox Live for XNA made XBLIG games to have access to.

I realise this is a big ask in terms of infrastructure that would have to be set up but I think you would see a whole new generation of games with much more advanced community features built in.

The way I'd see it working is in a similar way to how we access storage on local devices. You'd be able to query the networked storage to grab a list of available files and download them to the local device. You'd also be able to push files to the networked storage.

I'm currently working on a track building 3D racing game and the addition of this type of storage on Xbox Live would help build a community around the game and allow players to easily share their creations with other players.

Back-door code could easily be added to the game allowing an administrator gamertag to be able to manage the files on the networked storage while only providing limited access to all other 'normal' gamers.

This suggestion is similar to http://bit.ly/ffs7Nq but I don't think we need quite so much storage space, and I thought I'd include a little more detail, I specifically see this space as networked storage and nothing more.

I understand there are issues that would need to be addressed with this however, it could potentially be mis-used in an attempt to create a 'server' for a real-time game. Some limits would have to be imposed to make sure it's used in the proper way to share data in the way I explained. It could also store high scores and other data (probably a file per user, all with a certain file name prefix) and would effectively give us true global scoreboards and global distribution amongst all of our players rather than having to rely on peer to peer networking as we currently do.

I hope this does make it into the framework and Xbox Live in the future but as I mentioned I do understand the complexities involved with implementing this so don't expect it soon.

Fingers crossed,

Martin