Just as we suspected, the cunning group at Microsoft has revealed big plans for its XNA program, aimed at giving homebrew software developers a chance to showcase their talent.

John Schappert, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Live, Software and Services for the Interactive Entertainment Business (whew!) spoke minutes ago at the company's GDC press conference. As he puts it, the company feels it's time to "unleash" the potential of amateur developers. "An awful lot of democratization going on today," he stated.

Shortly after, Chief XNA Architect Chris Satchell took the stage to speak about the community side to the program. Just 18 months ago, the company took new steps into providing resources for amateur game developers through the XNA Game Studio. "The response has been incredible," he said, revealing that there have been over 800,000 downloads of the toolset. "That's a lot of creativity and passion that we've tapped into out there." Over 400 universities have embraced the software.

A Samari-infused dishwashing game was shown off, which creator James Silver described as a "personal story." Uh huh. More big news came when Satchell revealed plans for distribution: "For the first time ever this year you'll be able to have community games distributed via Xbox Live."

"With great power comes great responsibility," he went on, describing how the community would take charge of the content through creating, submitting, reviewing and playing the software. "I'm not going to be the arbiter of what the community does."

Shifting gears toward the "submit' portion of the studio, Satchell revealed that your XNA Creator identity will act just like a personalized Gamertag. After setting up a few options to let people in on what your game is all about, it goes to peer review from fellow creators.

Unsurprisingly, there won't be a full palette of options to choose from when creating your content. Everything from IP infringement to vulgar material (think porn) won't be allowed.

Next a few unique projects were displayed, including "JellyCar," "Little Gamers," "ProximityHD," "Trilinea," the list goes on. Get this – you can download demos of all these titles on Xbox Live Marketplace right now. Yes – now.

"10 million people on Xbox Live get to play your game," Satchell opinioned. "This year we complete that vision - we democratize game creation."

Image courtesy Joystiq.