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It's official: XNA is dead
February 2, 2013 6:00 PM | Staff
Microsoft has confirmed that it does not plan to release future versions of the XNA development toolset.
A blog post from developer Promit Roy earlier this week apparently detailed Microsoft's plans to fully retire the XNA Game Studio tools on April 1, 2014, while also suggesting that the future of API collection DirectX is uncertain.
The company has now further explained the situation to Polygon, assuring developers that DirectX development will continue, but stating that XNA has received its last update.
"XNA Game Studio remains a supported toolset for developing games for Xbox 360, Windows and Windows Phone," said the representative. "Many developers have found financial success creating Xbox LIVE Indie Games using XNA. However, there are no plans for future versions of the XNA product."
Numerous developers took to Twitter to mourn the death of the platform -- or otherwise. Unity CEO David Helgason in particular tweeted, "Farewell XNA, you were never quite the worthy opponent I expected, though you hit some high notes along the way."
He later added, "XNA was originally announced GDC 2005, just 3 months before Unity 1.0. I remember being quite worried at competing with all of Microsoft's might (remember, they really mattered back then). However they never really loved their own platform, and this closure isn't really a surprise if you followed them closely (like I did)"
"Microsoft have essentially turned their backs on 10,000 developers on one of the most promising gaming APIs available today," said Dominique Louis of MonoGame, the Open Source implementation of the XNA Framework.
"Everyone knew it was coming," they added, "but were secretly hoping that Microsoft were going to spring a surprise XNA 5 on them. Essentially, with no movement on XNA for more than a year and the key Microsoft developers moving on to other projects, it was wishful thinking to expect anything but this."
Hope for XNA developers
The news isn't all bad. While XNA is officially dead as far as Microsoft is concerned, MonoGame says it will continue to support XNA developers going forward. XNA devs can continue using the same tools they already have and, thanks to its SharpDX backend, can even publish to Windows 8, which otherwise doesn't support XNA.
"So far we have close to 20 MonoGame powered games on the Windows Store," Louis tells us. One of these -- Skulls of the Shogun -- was even published by Microsoft, which has given its blessing. The company even had MonoGame speak at its //Build summit.
XNA developers left in limbo are encouraged to check out the MonoGame site for more information.
and...
http://ventspace.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/directxxna-phase-out-continues/[^]
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Collin Jasnoch wrote: If I claim Objective C is dead will it make it true?
How much will it cost me to make that the case?
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Sweet. Sounds good to me.
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Right, I can now write a blog post saying Obj-C is being retired and the announcement slipped out on CP.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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This is a slightly better "confirmation" though:
Leakety[^]
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Microsoft, naturally, have denied they intend to discontinue XNA, but I remember them saying much the same for Silverlight.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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If I find multiple resources that are talking to internal Microsoft people, that's enough for me.
Microsoft doesn't really kill off products publicly. It's not unheard of find the occasional official obituary for a product, but for most part, MS kills stuff off quitely.
There is nothing that says Silverlight is dead, nothing that said Flight Simluator is dead, nothing that really said Bob was dead, ... and the list goes on and on and on.
There comes a point where you just have to accept it based on the paultry evidence you have.
XNA is dead. Everyone knows it. It's just a matter of those who are going to accept that fate or not.
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Collin Jasnoch wrote: As I implied elsewhere I really do not care either way. I am not an XNA dev. But
it is tiring to hear XYZ is dead. Especially with no actually evidence other
than blogs from non MS employees.
Are you going to put resources into a product that you are uncertain of the future of?
That's the entire point.
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I guess that would be just more reason for using OpenGL?
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Simple. Alternate between (a) feeling sorrow for those that were caught-out and had invested much time/effort into using the framework, and (b) feeling smug that such a demise seemed like such a likely prospect to me at its inception that I never bothered to take a look.
I.e, precisely the same reaction as was had towards Silverlight.
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All eyes are on Node.js, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, and Dart, but they're shaping up as transitional tech at best. Bonus #0: it's the only one installed on your client's computers already
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Hmmmm, that's a very strange little blog post. I'm not sure why Node is lumped in with the others as it is JavaScript. Also, as at least some of the others output JavaScript at the end, the "Target audience" argument is specious at best.
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The Node.js reference is probably just to get extra page views; it's not relevant to the article's main points.
I think the author is secretly a journalist stuck writing about software development to earn a paycheck despite neither knowing nor caring much about it. Most likely, he spends a few hours a day rewording controversial technology opinions of more knowlegable people for his articles while spending the rest of the day writing sci fi and fantasy novels, hoping that one of them may eventually sell big so he can quit his day job.
See his profile.
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Oh dear. A self published author as well.
Don't get me wrong, there are some amazing self-published authors. Given the quality of writing here, I don't feel he's one of them though.
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: not sure why Node is lumped in with the others as it is JavaScript.
the article doesn't flow that well (IMO).
I suspect the point he was trying to say was that javascript as a development medium is really taking off and that can be seen in things like node. the problem is that in the rest of the article he talks about the 4 different languages which ultimately generate javascript after compile.
Maybe I am playing the role of the advocate for this guy too much... 
you want something inspirational??
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Bonus #0 also applies to TypeScript and Dart - at least as far as they both compile to JS.
Personally I think this a wrong direction. There should be a concerted effort to come up with a better cross-browser model for programming in the browser. JS is a horrible choice as "the assembly language of the Web".
Imagine if someone chose VBScript as the "assembly language" for the desktop. (OK JS is better than VBScript, but not that much).
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Rob Grainger wrote: Personally I think this a wrong direction. There should be a concerted effort to come up with a better cross-browser model for programming in the browser. JS is a horrible choice as "the assembly language of the Web".
There sort of is, or rather there are a few efforts. The problem is that they're tied to vendors (Dart, Typescript, CoffeeScript), and everyone wants their horse to win.
Best would be for W3C, IETF, or someone neutral to propose something. ECMA just seems to be a professional rubber-stamp org these days.
--------------
TTFN - Kent
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Of the three you mentioned, only Dart has potential to avoid JavaScript - the other two compile to JavaScript - which is exactly my point. JavaScript is a horrible choice of "assembly language". Google's NaCl also allows native code to run in the browser (sandboxed), so the only two technologies that allow avoiding JavaScript both come from Google. Currently, only NaCl actually works in a mainstream browser (Chrome), although I believe Dart will be there soon too.
Try asm.js - which (on Firefox at least) allows compiling C++ to JavaScript written in such a way that it optimises array-like access to become true C-like arrays (itself an insane idea) someone ported the Unreal engine to it and, while a technical feat, I'm not overly excited by the potential to run games (in a browser) on a modern PC with about the performance of I got from games about 5 years back.
As you said, if the W3C could form some kind of standard VM specification, then different languages could target that and optimise it aggressively - following techniques initially established for Self and late for JavaScript (V8) and other languages such as Java (HotSpot) and .NET. That would seem a vastly superior approach technically. Unfortunately, in the real world web standards seem to be reverting to the model used days of competition between Netscape and IE (that yielded JavaScript itself). Implement it and hope it gets adopted widely enough that it becomes a de facto standard. Part of the blame actually lies with the standards bodies, which just haven't moved fast enough, so vendors implement partially defined standards effectively forcing them to standardise what's out there on the ground.
I absolutely agree with respect to ECMA too - but I'd still rather have "standards" at least available so others can implement them (as has happened with Mono and .NET).
In many ways I can't help think that the Web could be so much better. A combination of CSS's awful layout algorithm, the choice of XML (actually SGML) for defining HTML combine to make web development a much less pleasurable experience than it could be. Once again, Alan Kay put it well in an interview with Dr Dobb's Journal. Paraphrasing, the interviewer said something like "You can't argue with the success of the web", Kay responded "actually I can". The interviewer raised Wikipedia, to which Kay responded that when you look up something like geometry it should actually be possible to interact with diagrams. If all that sounds a bit far-fetched, it is useful to remember that many of those kind of interactions were pioneered by Sutherland's Sketchpad all the way back in 1963, Engelbert's Mother of all Demos (1968) and, naturally, Smalltalk systems (1980).
Sadly, computing seems to be a very reactionary field, where true innovations typically take generations to reach mainstream, if ever.
(End rant)
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Calling people who write code but aren’t employed as programmers “hobbyists” is offensive to some. They're "differently employed" programmers
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F'em.
I'm both a professional and a hobbyist. And proudly a member of the OpenVMS Hobbyist community as well.
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