Rowdy Labs Game Development?

I have some time over the December timeframe to possibly publish a casual game. Flash games and Xbox Live Arcade games are both in the "reachable" range. Flash games get immediate exposure through a number of sites, such as kongregate.com when you publish. Xbox Live Arcade games have to fit a large body of standards to be accepted (similar to MSN casual games), but I would imagine most highly successful flash games would also have to meet most of the criteria just to be good enough to get the playtime required.

Xbox Live Arcade monetizes through purchases of the "full game". Most games are available with one level for free, and the rest of the game for a small payment, usually between $2-$20 dollars.

Kongregate and other related sites profit share from the ads that play on the game sites.

I'm exploring flash right now. It will cost $350-$500 to buy Flash CS3 Pro. I'm not sure if the $350 offer is legit. The "visible serial number" language scares me. From what I understand, Adobe and several others have tied together open source ways to generate flash 9 swf files. I don't really want all the other items in CS3, so if that works, I'll probably put out at least a couple small flash games. (I won't be doing this alone, I have some associates who are interested in this and are capable).

I'm going to probably have to sign NDA's to get more info on XBLA, so will not be able to talk about it anymore. I will probably post what my final decision is though, as I'm pretty sure that isn't something a NDA will prevent me from saying. As the dev environment (Visual Studio C# Express) is free, I'm going to explore the costs and the likelihood I'll be able to get past the XBLA "acceptance" bar.

--Michael