Anyway, my main issue is that I can use the same tools, language & libs. That’s a big deal in my book, I *hate* being forced to use something different to what I would use on every other platform – I want to maximise my investment, not be forced to rewrite. The sandboxing isn’t a huge deal, most (good) libs accept inputs / outputs via proxies or memory buffers anyway.

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@Paul: I wasn’t saying XNA is a failure, I said it “hasn’t worked that well so far” – I think that’s a fair assessment. That’s not ruling out it working better in the future. But still, I think the inherent technical divide between XNA and “real” game development is a hurdle that inherently makes it less effective, and consigns it very much to a hobbyist demographic. Now if that’s the only target, then it’s a success – but the message I got was that XNA was being marketed to indie developers too, and in that respect it’s not working – no commercial team with any sense would target XNA based on the track record so far. What makes it worse is that there is no smooth technological transfer to XNA for existing games because it forces the use of different tech (.Net), meaning going in either direction means starting again in many respects, so indies can’t even do a quick & cheap port to XNA just to experiment (like they can on iPhone for example). So right now, I see it as something I might recommend to kids to learn with, but not anyone looking to migrate to commercial development in the relatively near future.

@Kevin: agreed – I’d like to think that the natural order is open creativity, and that situations where distribution is constrained is a temporary, local minima resulting from abnormal conditions (such as technical limitations leading to console hardware manufacturers ruling over an industry which is actually driven by content, not hardware). We’ll see.

This is your blog and I respect that you do prefer an open source tool-chain etc, but heck I started programming in proprietary Basic languages on the various 8 and 16 bit platforms. Though of course C++ etc will be the way for cross platform development for a business or someone that has learned computer science for a while, there is also no harm in giving someone a less daunting language to develop games and get published in a way that connected 360s across the world and make a little money… or just mess around and deploy on to a console and see your own stuff on the telly.

I suppose I just see room for great engines like Ogre and tools like Xna Game Studio for creating all kinds of independent content.

[)amien