Microsoft To Cease XNA Support, Leaving Indie Developers In The Dust
Bad news for indie game developers out there. Based on an email that came out of Microsoft last week the company will no longer be supporting the XNA Game Studio. According to the letter, XNA is not in “active development”.
For those of you who don’t know, XNA is a series of tools that anybody can use in order to develop games for Microsoft’s Xbox Live Indie Games service. It was started back in 2004, and since then over 2,250 games have been released for the service. It’s proven to be very popular with indie game developers, though according to a CVG’s development source there are “no advocates for the technology” within Microsoft, leading many to think that Microsoft will be ceasing support for indie game development altogether.
Besides the dropped support for XNA, something else that was interesting was what Microsoft had to say about DirectX. DirectX is also being dropped from the “MVP Award Program” as well, due to the fact that DirectX “is no longer evolving as a technology”. However, a Microsoft representative went on to contradict themselves by claiming that “DirectX is evolving and will continue to evolve”. It’s a little confusing to have 2 sources contradict each other like that, but if I had to guess, I’d say that Microsoft is getting rid of the DirectX as we know it and may be developing a whole new system to release under the DirectX name. Who knows?
