Microsoft have announced today that they will not be working on future versions of their XNA Game Studio software. XNA, for those who don’t know, is a development platform used to create titles for Xbox Live, Windows Phone, and the Xbox Indie Channel. In fact, Xbox 360 Indie games are all created using the XNA framework, so this announcement doesn’t bode well for the future of the service.
In some ways, this makes sense. Although XNA has been used to create wonderful titles such as Fez and Bastion, it was mainly used to fill up the Xbox 360 Indie Channel with Minecraft clones. Although Microsoft haven’t specifically stated that the Indie Channel will be disappearing, I wouldn’t be surprised. After all, it hasn’t blossomed into a thriving community of independent developers and gamers, like Microsoft would have wanted. Instead, it’s been almost completely forgotten, and I know many Xbox 360 users who didn’t even know it was there to begin with.
“No-one wants to learn a dying technology, and a big part of XNA’s appeal was the prospect of selling a game on Xbox LIVE, even if that wasn’t the most commercially-sensible thing to do,” a source told CVG. “If there are no advocates of the technology, and we infer from the lack of internal support in Microsoft that there will be no XBLIG on the next-gen machine, there is no-one to drive XNA adoption and no incentive to learn it.”
It should be pretty clear from this announcement that the Xbox Indie Channel will not be featuring on Microsoft’s next console. I suppose that’s a shame, but looking at the current selection of XBLIG titles, it’s not like we’re really losing much.
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Via: Polygon
