I'm concerned about the potential lifespan of XNA.

Some projects can take years to make, for example, Cave Story took 5 years for Pixel to make.

Considering that, I would like to know if MS is planning on keeping XNA and Community Games alive in its next console. It would be a shame for someone to spend several years making an excellent game, only to release it at the end of the 360's life span and without support on the next XBOX.


I ask this because I'm not sure I should invest an exhaustive amount of time and money making games in XNA, despite how rewarding it is to not have to worry about the low level plumbing. If it's only going to be temporary it's not going to be worth my time as anything more than a speedy way to make proof of concepts.

Yuyuyami:

Considering that, I would like to know if MS is planning on keeping XNA and Community Games alive in its next console.

No next console has been announced and nothing about XNA and Community Games has been announced. Nothing will be announced in these forums, either.

Considering Microsoft has said they are only about half way through this console generation after four years, I'd say you have at least four more years before you have to worry about it. I highly doubt they're going to do away with XNA Game Studio considering that it has not only been used for Community Games but a handful of XBLA games as well. As for Community Games, it's been around less than a year so trying to predict what or where it will be in five years is pretty much impossible to do.

Yuyuyami:

Some projects can take years to make, for example, Cave Story took 5 years for Pixel to make.

A well designed game is not so dependent on the api. They didn't spend the 5 year writing out DrawUserPrimitive function calls. You can switch the API that deals with the system out pretty quickly compared to everything else.

When XNA Game Studio eventually dies a horrible death, it will be replaced with another similar API. The syntax may be different, but the concepts will always be the same. So you will pick it up in no time. The windows Os will never be without an API to render graphics. Wether it's called GDI+, WinG, DirectDraw, OpenGL, OpenGLES, Direct3D, etc...

Yuyuyami:

Some projects can take years to make, for example, Cave Story took 5 years for Pixel to make.

And most don't

It's futile to ask about functionality for a non-existent console

First: Friends of mine that should know, say that there is not yet any real effort even to figure out what the hardware for a next console would be, much less actually pulling together all the resources to design, implement, manufacture and release one. I think it'll be many years before a truly new console comes out. (I'd be surprised if it was as early as 2012). Perhaps we'd see something like an "Xbox Plus" by then, that might come with different peripherals (Blu-ray? Natal?), and/or additional hardware (Natal acceleration, etc).

Second: The nice thing with XNA is that all you need to do is port the Compact CLR/.NET Framework, and the XNA runtime assemblies, and you will have a new platform supported. Even better is the fact that no developer can go "outside the box" and "bang the hardware." With the original Xbox, some developers wrote pretty much to the metal, which meant that those games were hard to create "compatibility handler" for for the new Xbox. (My guess: A "compatibility handler" is really more of a "port").
XNA has none of those problems -- all the code use the managed API, that Microsoft has full control over.

If I was in Microsoft's shoes, it would look very tempting to keep supporting XNA Game Studio on any new platforms (game consoles, music players, smart phones, hand-helds, dining room tables, etc). Thus, personally, I would be comfortable making the bet that, even if I started today and my game took three years to make, I could use XNA to deliver it. And, if it turned out that Microsoft decided to get out of the console business three years from now, and we all are playing games on our Samsung Em-Gages or something, then most of the effort in a game goes into the design and the art -- re-writing the code for another platform, once you have a working game, is a lot quicker than the first time around. A lot quicker.