Students can get a free Xbox Live Indie Games Portal registration if they verify their Student status via DreamSpark. However, we have received reports of students having difficulty registering for free. The reason is due to the fact that there is a pre-requisite, for the free student registration to complete successfully: students need to go to Xbox.com, create a Xbox Live account first and submit their billing information.
If this step is not carried out first, users will get an error message which isn’t very clear, about going to Xbox Live to create an account, but when they return to the Xbox Live Indie Games portal, they need to restart the registration process (i.e. they are not recognised, the user info is not persisted). As a result, the student can get confused and often do not complete the registration successfully. Unfortunately, we in the DreamSpark team, weren't briefed on it when we did the integration.
We have also been informed that if you previously had an App Hub account and sign in with the same email address of that account, there is no way for a student to renew without paying. This means that we need to let students, who had an old App Hub account, know that they need to register again, to create an new account using a brand new Microsoft Account.
This could affect all DreamSpark verified students trying to complete the Xbox Live Indie Game Portal registration. This also affects those students that do not necessary want to post a game to the app store but need to create an account to be able to connect XNA to an Xbox console and deploy their games for testing. This can be a blocking scenarios for educators and students learning and teaching game development on the Xbox via the console.
We have created a detailed document that covers the steps students need to follow for a successful registration. We are also in the process of updating the Indie Games Development Page on DreamSpark.com.
