XNA
More info
- Owner
- Microsoft
- Released
- 2006–2014
- Type
- Game framework
- Successor
- MonoGame (open reimplementation)
Microsoft's C#/.NET game framework, the first to let hobbyists ship games on a console.
XNA Game Studio arrived in 2006, bundling windowing, input, audio, a content pipeline and a ready-made game loop with Update and Draw into one C# API on top of DirectX. The name officially stood for "XNA's Not Acronymed". The same code ran on Windows and Xbox 360, and through Xbox Live Indie Games anyone could sell their game there.
It became the seedbed of the indie wave around 2010: Terraria, Bastion and Fez were written in XNA, and Stardew Valley started out on it. Microsoft stopped developing it in 2013 and let it lapse the following year. The games survived anyway, because MonoGame and FNA recreated the API as free software — one of the rare cases of an abandoned platform outliving its owner's interest.