Tuesday, July 5, 2016
By: Matthew Doucette
XNA 5.0 has been officially declined by Microsoft today, in favor of pushing developers to use the MonoGame framework, in conjunction with their upcoming support of MonoGame. MonoGame is the same framework we used to port Score Rush Extended to PS4. Request for XNA 5.0 was the most voted issue under Visual Studio UserVoice, with 23,684 votes as of today.
Here is Microsoft's official answer:
I suggest you ...
← Visual Studio 2015
23,684 votes
XNA 5
Please continue to work on XNA. It's a great way for indie game developers like myself to make games and give them to the world. XNA gave us the ability to put our games, easily, on the most popular platforms, and to just dump XNA would be therefor heartbreaking... I implore you to keep working on XNA so we C# developers can still make amazing games!
DECLINED · Visual Studio Team (Product Team, Microsoft Visual Studio) responded · July 05, 2016
Back in 2013, we announced that XNA 4.0 would be the last release of the XNA framework. We thank all of you who used XNA in your games, and we’re humbled by the number of you who want an XNA 5.0! However, XNA 5.0 is not something we’ll be developing.
We know that many of you want to use cross-platform engines to build your games and deploy them in all the places that gamers care about – Xbox, Windows, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii, iOS, Android and more. Now, there is an amazing ecosystem of game frameworks and engines that support building games on Windows and across all platforms.
If you are looking to port your existing XNA game to Windows 10 UWP, please explore the MonoGame framework, which is an open-source, cross-platform implementation of XNA, supporting Windows 10 UWP and a variety of other platforms. If you are looking to build a cross-platform game using C#, .NET and Visual Studio, you can explore Unity, a powerful 3D and 2D game creation tool and ecosystem. Unreal Engine 4 and Cocos2d are also great options for building cross-platforms games using Visual Studio.
In addition, if your game was built with XNA and previously worked on Windows or Windows Phone, it will continue to work.
http://www.monogame.net/downloads/
http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/universal-windows-10-apps.html
https://www.unrealengine.com/
http://www.cocos2d-x.org/
That is all.
About the Author: I am Matthew Doucette of Xona Games, an award-winning indie game studio that I founded with my twin brother. We make intensified arcade-style retro games. Our business, our games, our technology, and we as competitive gamers have won prestigious awards and received worldwide press. Our business has won $190,000 in contests. Our games have ranked from #1 in Canada to #1 in Japan, have become #1 best sellers in multiple countries, have won game contests, and have held 3 of the top 5 rated spots in Japan of all Xbox LIVE indie games. Our game engines have been awarded for technical excellence. And we, the developers, have placed #1 in competitive gaming competitions -- relating to the games we make. Read about our story, our awards, our games, and view our blog.