it seems microsoft did it again, when you fail to be innovative kick the stomach of someone who can,

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/389018/microsoft-email-confirms-plan-to-cease-xna-support/

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/02/01/report-xna-is-dead.aspx

Hopefully there will continue to be a way for independent developers to get games on the next xbox. I've discovered many good games through Xbox Live Indie Games, which required using XNA.

Maybe this is done as a way to push the Windows 8 app store on the next console.

Or they secretly like Linux so much that they try to look really mean and give Linux sympathy values a bump. :DD

Very confusing article that says XNA and Direct X are getting phased out, also says that they might be replaced, also says that microsoft plan to keep Direct X going and have no plans of discontinuing.

I have no idea what is going to happen.

Sounds like Microsoft wants to try and reinvent everything again

Given the fuckton of support MS has provided to developers of games like Bastion and Fez, that's about as two-faced a comment as they come. Yeah, they removed it from their MVP program, which is hardly killing it. Phil Fish's whining notwithstanding, MS has featured multiple indie titles in its Summer of Arcade programs, which includes massive "front page" type promotions that indie developers can only dream of. The first article is so full of innuendo and empty of substance it barely qualifies as news. I doubt they actually know any more about it than you already do.

And i only heard about it because of djranis, so perhaps i might add some more info to the story: Microsoft cannot afford to sustain their indie devs, so they've given up ;)

That's speculation just as bad as that story. I find it highly unlikely that MS is having any kind of problems with their Scrooge McDuck style vaults of cash over in Redmond.

Sometimes MS kills things, some no longer make sense, some are questionable, some are just to make more money. However, MS has been extremely developer friendly for years, decades even, they know the key to platform success is getting developers on board with your platform.

That's why i added the wink. I was being sarcastic, agreeing with you on your point as to the article being full of speculation and no substance.

Fair enough, gonna blame it on tired, I actually even wondered if you were being facetious, but really, I'm probably just a bad person;)

DirectDraw, Managed DirectX, WPF, Silverlight, now XNA, who is next? Windows is like a huge cemetery of dead technologies.

Silverlight isn't dead. The biggest streaming service in the USA, Netflix uses Silverlight. Direct Draw was merged with the rest but the old stuff from it is now discontinued but it is better to scrap some legacy stuff instead of creating a lot of bloat and keeping old security holes for legacy purposes. WPF is even included in Win 8 and Managed DirectX was continued with XNA.

And well it depends on what is actually scraped with that? The indie section of XBox live only? Then good ridance it was 90% full of crap that even most flash game sites would reject.

Most of them are from the Arcade section not the Indie section and the ones from there that make it to the PC belong to the good 10%.

Silverlight is very dead -- it was not included in Windows RT, and Metro IE doesn't support it (while it supports Flash). Of course, it will be used by some for decade or more, but it doesn't make it more alive -- COBOL is still used by some, too.