Microsoft has officially announced that XNA is done. Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best Games has written a nice article reflecting on XNA here.
All of our games have been made with XNA so what does this announcement mean for us? Not a lot actually. Although Microsoft is no longer supporting XNA with new updates, it’s not like all of those old XNA games are going to suddenly stop working overnight. We’ll probably end up doing our next game in XNA as well and then after that, we’ll figure out what our next move should be.
I’m a huge fan of XNA. It’s both powerful and easy to use – a rare combination indeed. XNA got me into professional game development and for that, I will be forever grateful. Here’s hoping that Microsoft changes their mind and decides to bring it back.
I doubt they will but it would be nice if they opened up the next console for work seamlessly with third party game engines. Systems like GameSalad, GameMaker, RPG Maker, ETC.
I was thinking of you guys when I heard about XNA’s “death.”
Please at least glance down MonoGame’s way before starting the next project =o)
I’m just a Linux user who would love to enjoy your games running natively…
So true. XNA drew me into game development as well. I continue to use it daily and enjoy the framework very much. I may start looking more seriously at MonoGame because I just can’t get excited about Unity.
Thanks for referencing Nathan’s article. It was a good read. I’ll look forward to hearing about how you guys move forward. You’ve been an inspiration to me since I downloaded Breath of Death VII!
It saddens me to hear about XNA, but Microsoft never really seemed behind it. I believe that Game Developers can do better than use C/C++. On a positive note, there is MonoGame – http://monogame.net/ – which is essentially an Open Source version of XNA and is also cross-platform iOS/Android for a fee (need to buy Mono for these platforms from Xamarin) – Cross Platform never mattered to Microsoft (and arguably, neither OS X nor Linux are interesting commercial platforms), but with the mobile market becoming so important, iOS/Android (the commercially viable mobile platforms) support is a huge, huge thing.
Right now, it’s not feature complete (you still need Visual Studio 2010 and XNA for Content Pipeline projects, but they are working on it) but some games already used it successfully. Also, MonoGame runs in Visual Studio 2012 instead of being limited to 2010 with XNA.
I’ve played around with it a bit, and I definitely see it as a viable way forward. In fact, some people reported porting their games with only a few minor touchups, including mobile.
It is a good thing that it got people into actually developing games or made it much more easy to do so. But you were restricted to a few proprietary platforms. Recent developments (Steam on Linux, Ouya etc) indicate that using multi platform/open source SDKs is worth some consideration.