At this year's Game Developer's Conference, Microsoft made the announcement of their new "Community Arcade," a segment of the vaunted Xbox Live Arcade platform. With Community Arcade, Microsoft is giving true power to tiny, independent (and often one-man) development groups, who can now create a game, upload it for free to the Community Arcade, and allow any Xbox 360 owner with access to XBLA to download it (still for free).

Game developers will be able to build profiles called "creator profiles" to track their games, but players will have a significant say in the process as well. In order to regulate content, creators will tag their games with labels like "violence" and "language," but players will later be able to tag and peer-review the games themselves.

While some demos are out right now for players to try out the new Community Arcade games (such as Walaber's "Jelly Car"), Microsoft has not yet announced an official launch date for their revolutionary "YouTube of games."

[via Joystiq]