The Hotdog Laserhouse

Way to go, Microsoft

Oh yeah. Remember why nobody likes or trusts Microsoft? Dude was developing a game using Microsoft’s coding suite called XNA. XNA is used to make games that run on both the PC and Xbox 360, specifically so they can be developed on PC and published in the “Indies” section of the Xbox dashboard. Regardless of that, some developers have started using it to do PC-only development because it’s fairly easy to use. But there’s one problem:

There had been rumours that XNA was going down the pan, that Microsoft weren’t supporting it anymore, all that sort of stuff. So at Develop [an annual games industry conference held in Brighton, UK this July] I went up to the guy on the Windows 8 stall and asked him to clear it up, I asked him to tell me whether or not my XNA game was going to run on Windows 8, because it was difficult to get a definitive answer.

He basically just looked at me and shook his head, and said ‘no, it won’t run.’ I said ‘at launch, or ever?’ And he said ‘ever.’

So that was a bit of worry. Rather than taking that one guy’s word for it I came away and Googled the shit out of the problem, and as far as I’m aware there’s still no official word from Microsoft on what the future of XNA is, how it’s all going to work on Windows 8, whether it’s going to work on Windows 8. So I’ve got this one guy who’s in the know telling me that the game I’ve worked on for the last year and a half isn’t going to be supported by Windows 8. And from that I can extrapolate that it won’t be supported on Windows 9, or 10, or any Xboxes or anything like that.

You can read the rest of the article here, but way to be Microsoft, Microsoft.

“Here’s a cool toolset to make games and software with! Oops, looks like you made the mistake of relying on it! Now you’ve screwed yourself! Guess you should’ve learned a real programming language instead of familiarizing yourself with something that was apparently just a marketing gimmick, huh?”