Two things to keep in mind with the MS Store and Metro;

1) Metro will not be coming to Win7. So if XNA was to suddenly gain Metro support you wouldn't have a massive part of the market anyway. It will also cut out all existing platforms.

2) The MS Store items will be vetted by MS, which is a good reason to raise the barrier to entry a bit above the XNA crowd if only to avoid the torrent of crap which very quickly hit on the XBLIG channel ('screen saves' and 'controller massagers' to name but two things). Having seen what happened when the barrier was so low I can't blame them for wanting to raise it a bit to try and increase the quality.

Now, this might not work, but well, gotta try I guess. Those with the skills to make qualities titles will likely put in the extra effort to do the missing work themselves, meanwhile XNA remains a decent learning platform.

Heck, it might even get an overhaul to support DX11 and the next XBox going forward; no one knows. MS haven't said it was dead, this whole 'sky is falling!' rubbish is just from one statement regarding native Metro interop with XNA, which when you consider objectively the platforms involved the way MS want to go makes a great deal of sense.

My personal prediction is that the next XBox, and by extension DX11+ PCs, will gain a new XNA-like SDK to work with which, like the first XNA, closely mirrors the console but will break large chunks of existing code due to the lessons learnt with the current incarnation of XNA.

But.. yeah.. people need to get a grip frankly.

Everyone freaked out at WinRT and it turns out they were wrong.

Now everyone is freaking out about this instead of spending some time waiting for MS to tell you what is happening at an event which focuses on this area instead of a Win8 core tech event.

Even IF Win8 stopped XNA working the market for the next few years is going to be Win7 dominated anyway (and Win7 x64 at that, but no one is crying about a lack of x64 support I note...)

So, yeah, nothing to see here but a load of over reaction... as normal.

[quote name='DarklyDreaming' timestamp='1317659760' post='4868600']
SlimDX doesn't solve the problem of getting your game deployed and sold on a console; XNA does. Until that is remedied there can never be equivalence between the two. Also, do realize that as long as Microsoft intends to support XBLIG there will be a need for something like XNA - unless someone here believes that XBOX3 (or whatever they end up calling it) will give out their entire devkit right of the bat. I, for one, find it... unlikely.

sorry but.. where is the problem? XNA deploys to XBOX and will keep doing so with or without Windows 8.


[/quote]

My reply was written in reference to this:

[color="#1C2837"]Let's face it, XNA is great but the quality of the work created with it is pretty low, the whole indie channel on xbox went pretty bad, save some rare exceptions all you have is awful games or awful games with avatars. [color="#1C2837"]Also add the great work people are doing with SlimDX and SharpDX and ask yourself if really there is the need for MS to commit to an upgrade of XNA?
I think they are just being consistent with the direction of the gaming" API they provide.. look how slim DX11 is compared to DX9. The general idea seems to be that, if you are serious about producing a game, you will do things your own way.


[color="#1C2837"]I don't see the advantage of XNA beside being based on C#.. and C# isn't going away any time soon. If there is a target audience, projects like SharpDX/SlimDX will take care of it and, surely, higher level libraries a-la sunburn will pop out. But, we are talking about 2+ years (maybe more) down the line before Win8 Metro apps will be "the only way" to do games, so people developing with XNA still have lot of time to profit from their investments without getting hysterical... and, if their codebase is a good one, all you'll have to do is to rework the rendering side of it.. just as a C++ shop that needs to move from DX9 to DX11.[/quote]
Clearly, my argument was:
1)...if XNA is to upgraded, there needs to be a motivation for this - that much is clear to everyone.
2)...if MS intends to support XBLIG then XNA, or it's successor, will need to be further developed and supported. As per #1 this needs a clear motivation.
3)...if MS intends for XBLIG to exist on XBOX3-or-whatever-it's-name-will-be then they will need XNA or it's successor (as per the above statement)
4)...XBOX720 will likely support DX11.
5)...XNA will support DX11.

My logic is flawless = win. No, but seriously, there is a need for XNA to remain for the foreseeable future and it will continue to receive upgrades until MS decides to nix the indie community from it's consoles - thus, there appears to be no reason to doubt they will give it necessary technical upgrades. Supporting the Metro interface probably is something they decided to wait with until they do the next major rewrite or they decided it is not necessary for what XNA provides.


If XNA is dropped it will mean the end of whatever future XBLIG might've had on the next XBOX or it will mean that XNA is being dropped in favour of something else - in which case it will likely be something similar to what XNA already is and provide much of the same functionality. XNA is not much more than another layer of abstraction on top of DirectX after all so replacing it wouldn't be difficult, just expensive.

I've not seen any evidence that MS have _lost sales_ as a result of the IPads?

see the latest worldwide PC shipment figures, they actually declined.
MS OSs are 99+% bundled thus any reduction in the number of PCs shipped == less sales for them.

though this is not completely due to ipad, theres also smartphones which are taking some of the use of a PC for amore than a few ppl
[/quote]Interesting that they actually fell - I guess at this point, the market is at saturation.

But yes, my main point is that it's not all about the Ipad; devcies like Nokia and Android phones (which are really still tablets, but they don't get counted as such) sell a lot more, and I can see some people making do with them rather than buying an extra laptop, just as you could argue with huge tablets like the Ipad or Samsung Galaxy (I know I delayed buying my Samsung N220 as a result of my Nokia 5800). Whilst Windows is a strong leader on mobile devices such as netbooks, they do have a lot of competition on mobile devices.

OTOH, it may be as I say, simply saturation - if phones/tablets/mobile devices didn't exist, would most people be going out to buy more laptops and desktop PCs when they already have one? Probably not.

On the whole M$ thing - I admit I may have used it once or twice 10-15 years ago when there were better alternatives I liked. But these days I see M$, sorry, MS, as one of the nicer and more likable companies.

I do find it interesting though, that drawing attention to how much money they have is considered a _criticism_ for Microsoft, yet it's spun as a good point for a certain consumer electronics company ("OMG! They have more money than the USA!" and other such misleading spinning press releases masquerading as news)...

M$ isn't an accepted abbreviation. MS is.

Nothing more to say about this except: get the fuck back to the topic guys.

P.S. If you google MS you'll find microsoft.com as the 4th result. Google M$...you won't find what you're looking for. So, again, no. Just no.

Google evidently doesn't support $ at all - e.g., search for USD$, and you'll see that the $ isn't highlighted even where it's shown in results; searching for $ alone shows no results. By all means criticise the use of "M$", but it is factually incorrect to suggest no one else uses it.

[quote name='mdwh' timestamp='1317305813' post='4867198']
[quote name='ChurchSkiz' timestamp='1317240329' post='4866927']
2. Convert to the new DirectX, you're taking a step backwards in terms of managed code. You're target market is competing against the apple iPad and any new tablets coming to market in the next year and a half. MS has a bad track record in the last few years in this kind of war.

What track record? We've yet to have a non-phone tablet war.

MS haven't done well with their mobile OS, but Windows 8 isn't a mobile OS. MS have done very well with Windows, of which 8 is a continuation, including on mobile devices like netbooks (which are the same market as tablets - we don't categories phones by whether they have a physical keyboard or not), despite Linux having a head start.
[/quote]

Zune vs iPod - utter failure
WP7 vs iPhone - utter failure
W8 vs iPad - ???[/quote]And Windows vs OS X?

Zune wasn't a failure - it wasn't the market leader, but neither are Apple in the phone market. I agree with the later comment that it's too soon for WP7 - the earlier Iphone models sold rather poorly, and it's only more recently they've become more established.

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Zune#Sales says that the Zune's share reached 10% in hard drive based mp3 players, and 3% overall. When Apple reached 10% in the (ill-defined) smartphone market, and 3% overall, it was already being hailed as an amazing success, with people portraying Apple as being the market leader. Yet MS with those same figures gets labelled a "utter failure" or "flop"...

I guess we'll have to see whether Windows 8 - which will be sold for computers as well as tablets - will be outsold by IPads.

Not in terms of casual app development. AFAIK no one is making a living writing $1 apps for the PC. iPhone/Android/Xbox live opened up a huge new market for casual developers to make money. This is only going to expand. I don't think the PC is dead, or anywhere close, but certainly casual users are trending more to tablets and phones than personal computers.[/quote]Well sure, Nokia phones etc are a goldmine for making a quick buck, it's been this way for years (I remember the whole "buy a ringtone for £3" almost 10 years ago).

But I think this is going to be shortlived. The big problem for people trying to make money on computers is that anything trivial, you can get for free. Once upon a time, it was possible to make money writing quick rubbish for computers too, but these days the low end market is saturated free alternatives, and it's starting to turn that way for phones (or if not, if the market is such a gold mine, then it will simply become saturated with developers all rushing to make millions).

Are there any statistics on how much casual gamers typically make I wonder, as opposed to the "success stories" which only focus on individual atypical cases?

But getting back to the original point - if a XNA developer was only interested in making money from casual games, and they believe this can be done best through phones, why on earth did they come to XNA in the first place? This is nothing to do with the discussion on API changes.

And if the API change is a problem, why doesn't that apply to the fact that they'll need to learn a whole new API (and possibly, language) to write for a phone?

Microsoft already released information about declining PC sales. Meanwhile iPads sales are going through the roof. It's hard to prove that directly but with 9m sales a quarter of iPads it would be a hard case to say they aren't losing customers. Here's a good rundown from some insiders from the annual meeting: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ .

This isn't an MS vs Apple competition, it's about W8 vs ALL the competition in the new tablet market before a W8 launch. Adding Android or Blackberry OS only increases the likelihood that W8 sales will lower. In a competitive marketplace where vendors are pushing updates hard and fast, Microsoft is a slow-moving behemoth that will not win the war unless it alters its execution.[/quote]See my reply above about declining PC sales and the IPad. Saying that sales are going through the roof is irrelevant - we have one market that is saturated, and then a different product that is new, and therefore it's natural that sales increase. This doesn't mean that the latter is the cause of the former!

I also don't understand the "slow-moving behemoth" argument - this would describe Apple too; similar to my previous post, why is it a bad thing that companies like Microsoft are big, yet hailed as a good thing for Apple? They are also later than other companies to enter many markets (e.g., phones), and no one cares about that.

Though I agree it's not all about Apple . (9m a quarter? Is that all? Small compared to the hundreds of millions of phones sold - so if we're going to make the A implies B fallacy, we should at least pick something that sells more.)

So if MS loses that edge of easy development, why would anyone choose that platform willingly?[/quote]Maybe same reason people write IPad and IPhone games when they had tiny market share, and there have always been larger platforms.
[/quote]

Well look at WP7. If WP7 required a special piece of hardware to develop for and no toolkit (like XNA or silverlight), do you think you would see more than a handful of apps for it? There just isn't enough market share in WP7 to make it worth it on its own. W8 should utilize the synergy between xbox and wp7 (or wp8). Make it so you can push out an app for one platform and distribute it to all the platforms, all from one marketplace. They are the only company with the availability to have a cross-platform market for PCs, tablets, phones, MP3 players, media centers, and consoles. I was expecting that to be the front and center message of W8.
[/quote]Oh yes, I agree it to be a good thing if they make a cross-platform across computers and tablets/phones. I was just pointing out that other platforms seem to be excused when they have tiny market share, or require customer hardware to develop for (the latter is still the case for Apple's tablets and phone products).

[quote name='ChurchSkiz' timestamp='1317313547' post='4867247']
[quote name='mdwh' timestamp='1317305813' post='4867198']
[quote name='ChurchSkiz' timestamp='1317240329' post='4866927']
2. Convert to the new DirectX, you're taking a step backwards in terms of managed code. You're target market is competing against the apple iPad and any new tablets coming to market in the next year and a half. MS has a bad track record in the last few years in this kind of war.

What track record? We've yet to have a non-phone tablet war.

MS haven't done well with their mobile OS, but Windows 8 isn't a mobile OS. MS have done very well with Windows, of which 8 is a continuation, including on mobile devices like netbooks (which are the same market as tablets - we don't categories phones by whether they have a physical keyboard or not), despite Linux having a head start.
[/quote]

Zune vs iPod - utter failure
WP7 vs iPhone - utter failure
W8 vs iPad - ???[/quote]And Windows vs OS X?

Zune wasn't a failure - it wasn't the market leader, but neither are Apple in the phone market. I agree with the later comment that it's too soon for WP7 - the earlier Iphone models sold rather poorly, and it's only more recently they've become more established.

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Zune#Sales says that the Zune's share reached 10% in hard drive based mp3 players, and 3% overall. When Apple reached 10% in the (ill-defined) smartphone market, and 3% overall, it was already being hailed as an amazing success, with people portraying Apple as being the market leader. Yet MS with those same figures gets labelled a "utter failure" or "flop"...

I guess we'll have to see whether Windows 8 - which will be sold for computers as well as tablets - will be outsold by IPads.
[/quote]
Zune was a failure not because of market share, but because they never updated it or provided features that it needed to stay competitive. Apple was releasing new versions of iPod every year and it took MS like 2-3 to get a touch screen out. The marketplace bombed because they didn't support it, even though tons of people had written their own games and apps for it, they just didn't let anyone release their products.

WP7 is on the same path. It could be competing directly with iPhone and Droid, but they aren't updating it. It's taken them 2 years to push out a half version change. Meanwhile iPhone and Droid have done a dozen updates. They are not listening to their customers until it's too late.

Not in terms of casual app development. AFAIK no one is making a living writing $1 apps for the PC. iPhone/Android/Xbox live opened up a huge new market for casual developers to make money. This is only going to expand. I don't think the PC is dead, or anywhere close, but certainly casual users are trending more to tablets and phones than personal computers.[/quote]Well sure, Nokia phones etc are a goldmine for making a quick buck, it's been this way for years (I remember the whole "buy a ringtone for £3" almost 10 years ago).

But I think this is going to be shortlived. The big problem for people trying to make money on computers is that anything trivial, you can get for free. Once upon a time, it was possible to make money writing quick rubbish for computers too, but these days the low end market is saturated free alternatives, and it's starting to turn that way for phones (or if not, if the market is such a gold mine, then it will simply become saturated with developers all rushing to make millions).

Are there any statistics on how much casual gamers typically make I wonder, as opposed to the "success stories" which only focus on individual atypical cases?

But getting back to the original point - if a XNA developer was only interested in making money from casual games, and they believe this can be done best through phones, why on earth did they come to XNA in the first place? This is nothing to do with the discussion on API changes.

And if the API change is a problem, why doesn't that apply to the fact that they'll need to learn a whole new API (and possibly, language) to write for a phone?
[/quote]

I started using XNA because it was an easy to use tool. However, I caught the vision that I could deploy to my xbox, zune, and wp7 as well as PC. I actually bought a Zune so that I could play my games on it. The beauty of XNA is that you can deploy to any of those platforms with extremely minor changes to code.

Microsoft already released information about declining PC sales. Meanwhile iPads sales are going through the roof. It's hard to prove that directly but with 9m sales a quarter of iPads it would be a hard case to say they aren't losing customers. Here's a good rundown from some insiders from the annual meeting: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ .

This isn't an MS vs Apple competition, it's about W8 vs ALL the competition in the new tablet market before a W8 launch. Adding Android or Blackberry OS only increases the likelihood that W8 sales will lower. In a competitive marketplace where vendors are pushing updates hard and fast, Microsoft is a slow-moving behemoth that will not win the war unless it alters its execution.[/quote]See my reply above about declining PC sales and the IPad. Saying that sales are going through the roof is irrelevant - we have one market that is saturated, and then a different product that is new, and therefore it's natural that sales increase. This doesn't mean that the latter is the cause of the former!
[/quote]
I mentioned that. But even MS is recognizing that PC sales are declining. You can't determine the cause 100%, but certainly some people (eg my Mom), are exchanging new PC sales for tablets. PC sales are down for the first time EVER. That would be awfully cooincidental to be timed with the huge growth in tablets.

I also don't understand the "slow-moving behemoth" argument - this would describe Apple too; similar to my previous post, why is it a bad thing that companies like Microsoft are big, yet hailed as a good thing for Apple? They are also later than other companies to enter many markets (e.g., phones), and no one cares about that.

Though I agree it's not all about Apple . (9m a quarter? Is that all? Small compared to the hundreds of millions of phones sold - so if we're going to make the A implies B fallacy, we should at least pick something that sells more.)
[/quote]

It's not that MS is big, it's that they are slow moving. Apple from what I have seen is pretty good at implementing key feedback from customers into their products as quickly as possible. Google is excellent at it. Amazon from what I have seen with the Kindle is also going to be changing rapidly. MS on the other hand, seems to be waiting until it's too late to make changes. If MS spent some time on their own forums and updated their products based on said feedback, I don't see them having a problem competing at the top. But as I mentioned, in a market where you have Apple, Google, and Amazon in a three way pissing contest, you better expect your new OS to be updating frequently based on the competition. Something which MS has had a really bad track record of in the last half decade.

So if MS loses that edge of easy development, why would anyone choose that platform willingly?[/quote]Maybe same reason people write IPad and IPhone games when they had tiny market share, and there have always been larger platforms.
[/quote]

Well look at WP7. If WP7 required a special piece of hardware to develop for and no toolkit (like XNA or silverlight), do you think you would see more than a handful of apps for it? There just isn't enough market share in WP7 to make it worth it on its own. W8 should utilize the synergy between xbox and wp7 (or wp8). Make it so you can push out an app for one platform and distribute it to all the platforms, all from one marketplace. They are the only company with the availability to have a cross-platform market for PCs, tablets, phones, MP3 players, media centers, and consoles. I was expecting that to be the front and center message of W8.
[/quote]Oh yes, I agree it to be a good thing if they make a cross-platform across computers and tablets/phones. I was just pointing out that other platforms seem to be excused when they have tiny market share, or require customer hardware to develop for (the latter is still the case for Apple's tablets and phone products).
[/quote]

Well I'm in total agreement with you. That was what I was getting at. WP7 had a huge advantage in that developers didn't have to learn a new API, they could deploy products they had already launched for PC or Xbox. The question is why would you not announce that same feature for your new tablet OS? They had a serious leg up in a market where everyone had to learn a new API to develop an app. They aren't supporting one of the best things they had going for it.

WP7 is on the same path. It could be competing directly with iPhone and Droid, but they aren't updating it. It's taken them 2 years to push out a half version change. Meanwhile iPhone and Droid have done a dozen updates. They are not listening to their customers until it's too late.

It hasn't been out for 2 years yet and it's had 4 updates with one major update. It took android even longer to hit froyo, which was probably their first truly significant update. Android has also only done 6 named major updates the first 3 of which were mostly just bug fixing or adding basic features such as the ability to record video.

It's not that MS is big, it's that they are slow moving. [/quote]
Perhaps, but I'ld say there major fault for falling behind the competition is their conservatism (which does lead to be slow moving).
They are very very conservative and dont innovate, all/most of their new stuff is from other companies that theyve brought out.
Im not saying they should be like Google which comes up with new stuff every 5 minutes (and often abandons it 6 months later which aint good) but they need to take some sort of middle ground or else theyre just gonna keep falling further and further behind

Perhaps, but I'ld say there major fault for falling behind the competition is their conservatism (which does lead to be slow moving).
They are very very conservative and dont innovate, all/most of their new stuff is from other companies that theyve brought out.
Im not saying they should be like Google which comes up with new stuff every 5 minutes (and often abandons it 6 months later which aint good) but they need to take some sort of middle ground or else theyre just gonna keep falling further and further behind

I think it's different. They innovate, they just never release any products with most of their cool innovations, or they don't highlight them. MS pours craploads into RnD and very often produces some awesome things, it just takes them forever to bring them to market or they don't bring them to market at all.

edit: woops

Zune was a failure not because of market share, but because they never updated it or provided features that it needed to stay competitive. Apple was releasing new versions of iPod every year and it took MS like 2-3 to get a touch screen out. The marketplace bombed because they didn't support it, even though tons of people had written their own games and apps for it, they just didn't let anyone release their products.

What matters other than market share?

If you mean that ultimately it was discontinued, I don't think that makes it a failure. Apple discontinue product lines too, that doesn't mean they were utter failures.

And you mention games and apps, are we talking about mp3 players, or handheld computing devices? Nokia sell a large number of mp3 players, though they usually aren't counted in the stats, as these devices do other things too. I have a Sansa, I don't care that it can't do apps, just as the Ipod user doesn't care that it can't do phone calls.

As for updates - does this mean Apple are far worse when it comes to phones, because we only get a new product every year or so, compared with the large number of phones that you get from other companies?

WP7 is on the same path. It could be competing directly with iPhone and Droid, but they aren't updating it. It's taken them 2 years to push out a half version change. Meanwhile iPhone and Droid have done a dozen updates.[/quote]WP7 is barely a year old.

I started using XNA because it was an easy to use tool. However, I caught the vision that I could deploy to my xbox, zune, and wp7 as well as PC. I actually bought a Zune so that I could play my games on it. The beauty of XNA is that you can deploy to any of those platforms with extremely minor changes to code.[/quote]See, MS do do good things too I don't have an opinion on whether the change about XNA is a good or bad thing.

It's not that MS is big, it's that they are slow moving. Apple from what I have seen is pretty good at implementing key feedback from customers into their products as quickly as possible. Google is excellent at it. Amazon from what I have seen with the Kindle is also going to be changing rapidly. MS on the other hand, seems to be waiting until it's too late to make changes. If MS spent some time on their own forums and updated their products based on said feedback, I don't see them having a problem competing at the top.[/quote]But it took years for Apple to implement missing features in their phones, even though they were bog standard in feature phones years earlier - apps, 3G, video recording, video calling, multitasking. And they've completely refused to respond to requests for things like Java and Flash.

And as I say, Apple tend to be a company that have a smaller product line and release products less often, compared to most people. Not that that's a bad thing, I just don't see it agrees with what you're saying.

Well I'm in total agreement with you. That was what I was getting at. WP7 had a huge advantage in that developers didn't have to learn a new API, they could deploy products they had already launched for PC or Xbox. The question is why would you not announce that same feature for your new tablet OS? They had a serious leg up in a market where everyone had to learn a new API to develop an app. They aren't supporting one of the best things they had going for it.[/quote]Yes, I do agree. It's still unclear to me how common the Windows tablets will be. I don't care about XNA, but say, will I be able to recompile my C++ application written for x86 Windows, for an ARM Windows tablet? This sort of thing would give them a huge advantage (similar to how Windows netbooks quickly overtook Linux, despite the head start Linux had). If not, I fear they will struggle as it will be effectively seen as a separate platform.

Nokia do have a cool thing going with Qt - the same C++/Qt code for desktops can be recompiled for Nokia phones (obviously when writing for phones, you probably want to design your application rather differently, but it isn't an issue from the point of view of the language or API). Unfortunately it's unclear where Qt is going, now that they'll be using WP7 (though there was a hint that they'll be porting Qt to their low end S40 smartphones, which would be cool).