Jan 31, 2013

XNA the end

This entry at Promit Roy's blog finally confirmes that any last hope of XNA should be left. This is, probably, better than nothing, however it was almost obvious with release of Windows 8 SDK with DirectX merged into it. Yet they gained some little respect at least from that point. This is, probably, the only point from which respect can be given.

First they they should say that earlier. Second, they should not drop XNA at all. Despite some negative aspects XNA was extremly intuitive and easy to work with. It was a huge success, enormous attention from developers of wide range of expecience, from novice to professionals. Terraria was written in XNA, a 1.5+ million sells title. They don't need even to add support for WinRT. Just a mere bugfixing, support and Visual Studio 2012 integration.

Enough rant. The question is, should you continue to use XNA? It, of course, depends. If you amateur or just started to learn game programming, it doesn't really matter, you can safely continue to write your first games. However, you can try to port your game to MonoGame to be ready for Windows 8. Last option is also to consider for writing your first more or less serious game, which, most probably you want it to evolve and live in future. Professionals can decide for thenselves I guess, but I guess XNA is no longer a valid option for pro game development.