Submitting to Microsoft App Hub

Well, we’ve just gone through the arduous task of submitting our first game title to Microsoft.

We thought we’d post some of the things we had to go through to ensure that firstly the game was ready and secondly, we were ready for the process.

Okay, so once we had finished with our final tinkers on the actual game we had to check off the following things:

Next step was to create a packaged XAP file for the App Hub site.

Now we had to jump through the hoops that was the Microsoft App hub site

You’ll find that if you try to tick all of the countries to distribute to, you’ll get a warning that looks something like this:

Cannot submit application. Missing game rating.

 OFLC-NZ missing rating and/or certificate

 USK missing rating and/or certificate

 DJCTQ missing rating and/or certificate

  Etc…

Basically, the site will highlight in Bold Orange writing, the countries that you need to have a certificate for. What you’ll need to do is tick every country except for the ones that have the certificate requirement highlighted.

This does mean that your game won’t be released in those countries, but Microsofts say they are working on the problem and the reasone for the issue is: “We are supporting new countries in this release and some of them have mandatory game rating requirements”.

You can read more on this issue here: http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/87527/527303.aspx#527303

 A step by step guide for submitting your game can be found on the app hub site here: http://create.msdn.com/en-US/home/about/developer_registration_walkthrough_choose_account

Here’s another really good link. It’s a detailed blog on the individual sections and codes needed to enter your bank account information when signing up for a Windows Phone 7 Marketplace account (note, this is for Australia only):http://mobilewares.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/wp7-marketplace-signup-help-for-aussies-bank-info-more/

Hope this helps out any other developers that are submitting for WP7!