Hardly. PC gaming was big before the Xbox and one could argue that the platform would be actually better off without it: a lot of PC games are shitty console ports or just crippled in general because the low-end hardware of these consoles.

And the "next-generation" doesn't look better either. Console hardware is already outdated right out of the gate, the second half of their generation will be painful.

Well they already killed their XNA framework...

Regardless how much XNA was praised, it was a indie only thing.

The majority of professional studios still use C++ based engines.

Unity is the Microsoft's endorsed replacement for XNA, as announced in the Visual Studio 2013 release keynote.

Unity is not for everyone though. There is a lot of hobbyists who prefer writing games instead of scripting ready-made chunks.

Also it has a lot of warts (nothing is ideal): http://t-machine.org/index.php/2013/12/27/2014-entity-system...

XNA is a good public image making tool, not just an API. https://twitter.com/search?q=%23becauseofXNA&src=hash

MonoGame is unfortunately still lacking an own content pipeline.

Since I am comfortable with C++, I tend to play around with engines with C++ bindings.

I rather use C++ than being stuck in .NET 3.5, without any more modern C# goodies.

As for scripting ready-made chunks, I guess one has to decide if they want to make a game or a game engine.

"I rather use C++ than being stuck in .NET 3.5, without any more modern C# goodies" - I use all modern C# features with XNA - what is the issue (except for async/await maybe)?

"I guess one has to decide if they want to make a game or a game engine" - exactly, but there should be a choice. XNA being a framework rather than engine provided such a choice in a high-level way.

> I use all modern C# features with XNA - what is the issue (except for async/await maybe)?

The libraries are also important and they are stuck on .NET 3.5 offerings.

Another problem is the old version of Mono they are using, which doesn't not have the JIT and GC improvements of more recent versions.

This is what I was able to gather from online sources, when wondering if it was worth the time and space to install it.

> Regardless how much XNA was praised, it was a indie only thing. The majority of professional studios still use C++ based engines. Unity is the Microsoft's endorsed replacement for XNA, as announced in the Visual Studio 2013 release keynote.

Doesn't matter. Goodwill is important, Microsoft is big enough they can afford to maintain 1 library.

If you ever worked in a big corporation, would know that doesn't work like that.