What went wrong with XBLIG
Monkey Archive Forums/Digital Discussion/What went wrong with XBLIG
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| http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ThomasSteinke/20130202/185921/What_went_wrong_with_XNAXBLIG.php Pretty interesting seeing on how their autonomous marketplace failed for indie developers. |
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| The article was interesting. I wonder what they will be doing on the next console? |
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| Nothing went wrong, I think this is just MS 'realigning' themselves with what's going on in Android/iOS land. XBLIG *was* effectively MS's 'App Store' - it allowed hobbyist coders the chance to develop/publish for XBOX, just like they can on iOS/Android, which was/is awesome. The new 'win8 store8' is far more like XBLIG than anything else MS have done - you too can write/publish a game for 100 bucks a year... IMO, XNA died because: * It couldn't compete with C++, and both Android/iOS allow developers to code in C++. GC is *theoretically* as fast as manual memory management. In practice, this isn't 'as true' for games - witness the 'pooling' BS people have to go through in Monkey to avoid GC issues. * It was 'too finished'. It's an incredibly elegant API (there is *no* native/casting stuff in there) because it's is designed purely for DX8. But we live in a post DX8 world - D3D11 alone supports about 7 (or something) types of shader/pipeline! When the hardware is advancing as fast as 3D hardware is advancing, API's need to be adaptable. And XNA isn't/wasn't - it would have been hard to shoe-horn geometry shaders alone in there, let alone all the other types of shaders we're likely to see in the near future. Which is NOT to say it couldn't have fulfilled the needs of a large subset of gamedevs for a long time to come... * Ultimately, if you're gonna let developers loose on your HW with C++, a managed language is kind of redundant. At the very least, if you're allowed to develop in C++ on MS HW, you can use Mono and some XNA clone lib (there's one out there already). Of course, that depends on MS *allowing* us to use C++ on their HW, but given that Android and iOS do, they'd be nuts not too...? I actually found windows phone 8 surprisingly cool to develop for. C++ is fast (an important consideration for gamedev) and D3D11 (once you've created the #*$!ing device!) and XAudio2 are great APIS. Hopefully, this is the new 'XNA', and I think it's better. |
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| I actually found windows phone 8 surprisingly cool to develop for. C++ is fast (an important consideration for gamedev) and D3D11 (once you've created the #*$!ing device!) and XAudio2 are great APIS. Hopefully, this is the new 'XNA', and I think it's better. Awesome to hear Mark! It's a great platform - people just need to give it a chance. |
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