Is XNA a success or not?

[roto23]

About a year after XNA came out I noticed a drop in activity in the boards here at TrueVision. But since I like TV so much I decided to stick with it and not study XNA. Also over the past year I see more and more books, tools and other stuff being made for XNA, however, about once a month I will do a job search on Monster.com using the keyword "XNA" as my search and yesterday I did not get a single hit. Usually I get 1 or 2 and when I read the job description it really isn't game development.

So what are your thoughts, has XNA taken off as a serious game development tool?

[arnienet]

I'm of the impression that XNA was developed to make the game development process for the XBox more accessible to the genreal programmer, i.e. managed DX. (We all probably know that when XNA was launched it was a replacement for the then managed DX8/9 (v1.1, I think)). This would allow for more titles for the XBox and PC and keep up the competition.

At the time I was writing a game engine in C# (quicker to develop in than c++, and the only target platfoem was PC). When I looked at XNA is struck me as a wrapper that grouped the DX calls into a higher set of function calls, and basically made it easier to set up a game loop in a pre defined M$ structure. I quickly dismissed it as it seemed a simplified version of DX9 with some loss of performance and flexibility.

It also seemed likely at the time that M$ would force you to use XNA rather than Managed DX, and this is one of the reasons I started using TV3D. Since then I notice M$ released an managed DX update patch (rather than XNA) and now it seems that this is installed automatically with the latest DX9 update (I've just run my old project (c# / MDX), from pre XNA days, and it runs fine on a new install of windowsXP and latest DX9 install, meaning MDX still lives!).

So in a nutshell it doesn't look like XNA achieved  as much as M$ wanted. It didn't attract so many managed DX9 developers, sending them instead to other engines, and it didn't encourage that many non 3D game developers to take up the challenge of writing a game. I guess a good test apart from as you say, the job ads, is to see how many new titles there have been for XNA recently?

I think there will always be a flow games for the XBox with a company like M$ behind it, but I reckon they have changed tack and probably had a lot to do with the funding of Crysis, what better way to show off the launch of DX10??

[Zaknafein]

I think it's a serious development tool for indies. The main problem is that I haven't experimented with enough alternatives to say that XNA is a main contender in today's market...

I don't think MDX is something you should use anymore. It's not up to date and has a lot of holes in its API. SlimDX seems a much better choice if you want to avoid XNA.

If you look at the huge (and growing) number of games on the "Indie Games" (formerly Community Games) channel of Xbox Live, I'd say it totally is a success. And if you look at games like Dust:An Elysian Tail (DreamBuildPlay winner of this year), it's safe to say that you can make a quality product with XNA. Now whether you can make good money from using XNA, not as easy to say.
You can if you're serious, have a good pitch and media attention, and possibly if you want to tie yourself to a platform like Xbox Live Arcade.

We have been working on Fez using XNA for a bit over two years now and it hasn't always been a smooth ride, but I'd say that I'm satisfied with most of the API and workflow. I really don't mind the Game framework and the path it kinda forces you to adopt. You can extend it easily and it's just good to abstract some inner workings.

This has been said many times before (in the TV forums), but don't expect XNA to be on the same abstraction level as TV3D; it's not. There's facilities for sprites/models and a cool content pipeline, but you still end up coding much more than you would in a real engine. You have to build your own TV3D on top of XNA, in other words.
But at least you have a good samples library and documentation.

[arnienet]

Thanks ZaK for the clarification, I haven't touched XNA or MDX for a long long time, thanks to TV3D  . Interesting that the community has picked up where MS left off.

[sinisa1982]

XNA is a framework  , TV is SDK.