Didn't want to put this in News, but there's a fair amount of fuss over some emails that have been going out to XNA/DX MVPs from Microsoft.

http://ventspace.wordpress.com/2013/01/ ... continues/

IIRC, Machaira is an XNA MVP so maybe he can shed some light on this.

There is a follow up post that attempts to clarify the situation, but IMO just rags on OpenGL.

Thoughts?

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
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Like mentioned in the article, the quote is really badly worded. It's always a mention of "XNA/DirectX" not "XNA and DirectX" or anything more specific. This quote alone has room for a lot of interpretation which i'm not going to bother to write down since it would be all speculation.

What i will say however is that phasing out XNA is probably the worst decision MS has done yet (and they made a bunch of bad steps in the last couple years). Not only will they piss off the indie community, but they'll strengthen the market for competition. Fine, no XNA? might aswell use OpenGL and not mostly restrict myself to MS platforms. This seems like a fairly poor business decision. Furthermore they will be closing down access to the xbox store to indie devs. From what i've read MS is not fun to work with as a business partner in the first place but it's still a big opportunity for indie devs to get their foot in the door.

The more i hear about MS screwing up it feels like it's only Suits sitting in there making decisions (which probably is the case anyways) instead of a company that cares for their customers, about their community and their overall perception. They've never been close to the 'good guys' but they're steadily moving closer to being the bad, or probably more fittingly, the moronic.

I mean come on. All they've done lately is like "Google is big, lets do that too", "Oh iOS is big, lets do that aswell", "Oh proprietary systems make more money, lets...". Not that all these decisions are inherently bad, but if they do it, they might aswell not do a halfassed job with it, instead of mostly doing the same in a different dress.

But what can i say, it's not like ranting on forums about it will make any difference, ey?

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wzl's burrow

Who cares if it was vague. We already know empirically Microsoft is "phasing out" of just about anything respectable they're responsible for.

I do like weezl's rant.

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What most people don't understand is what I like to explain as a thing that I understand.

^This^
I am staggered by some of the decision making that's currently going on at Microsoft. I find it hard to believe that the fuss over DirectX and XNA is genuine, but then I look at WP8's total failure to gain traction, the Windows 8 UI row and tablets that fall apart or have half the storage used up out of the box and I wonder what happened to the unstoppable Microsoft of 10 years ago.

Microsoft know they have lost the edge and the current attempts to get it back are embarrassing.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
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Imho, what happened is that the world changed, and they don't understand what to do.

10 years ago, you could sell technology. It was OK to have a computer crash, and throw a blue screen with incomprehensible numbers onto it.
It was ok, to have to look for drivers for your XYZ2353 video card, and install them in your OS.

Now, users don't know about technology. They have no idea what an OS is. They think in apps, in functionality for them. At every place where they go.

From a pure user experience, I believe Windows is no competition with Apple, you cannot match the slick and consistent user experience of Apple with their technology-oriented software.

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My project: Messing about in FreeRCT, dev blog, and IRC #freerct at oftc.net

I can't tell whether PC gaming is becoming a niche thing or if it's getting a breath of rejuvenation from the indie sector. Seems to see-saw either way.

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

More rant:

The "indie sector" seems to consist of developers who are incapable of cognition beyond obtaining Unity to relieve their senseless stack of "do you know what would make an awesome game?" ideas, such as identifying what actually constitutes the "indie sector" and why they are inherently part of it. People too often desire to make games, look at their wallets, can't see the $1'000'000, then associate their self-image with an ingenius shoelace tier who is capable of pulling it out (the money) from the bottom of a magic hat and proceeding to cause all of those *half-assed commercial developers* to scratch their heads.

I hate the "indie sector," primarily because its constituents don't really understand the face of game development as they think they do. You know; *no-budget, unduly determined, forced-to-innovate frontier pushers.* Many of the most successful "commercial developers" started with virtually no budget (and no god damn Kickstater). They did acknowledge their high ambitions, but they didn't pretend that it's a phenomenal rave to achieve high success through awkwardly placed ambitions (intentionally).

And I'm sure everyone here will disagree with me here, am I right? Yep. I'm just a hater, of course.

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What most people don't understand is what I like to explain as a thing that I understand.

I think we're into a whole new area here. However, it's an interesting debate so I'll start a new thread.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=11978

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
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XNA isn't going anywhere. The XNA award for the MVP program is being gotten rid of, that's it. The 360 is still around and will be for a while since MS hasn't even officially announced a new console. XNA is still the only way for indies to get on the console and it still works for PC and Windows Phone as well.

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Microsoft XNA MVP