While not exactly earth shattering news, Microsoft today slammed the door on the idea of XNA 5.
The following request was posted to the Visual Studio feedback system
Please continue to work on XNA. It’s a great way for indie game developers like myself to make games and give them to the world. XNA gave us the ability to put our games, easily, on the most popular platforms, and to just dump XNA would be therefor heartbreaking… I implore you to keep working on XNA so we C# developers can still make amazing games!
Now XNA has been dead and buried for a long time but I think a fair number of people held out hope that XNA would come back at some point. Given their answer, there is no question of hope now:
Back in 2013, we announced that XNA 4.0 would be the last release of the XNA framework. We thank all of you who used XNA in your games, and we’re humbled by the number of you who want an XNA 5.0! However,XNA 5.0 is not something we’ll be developing.
We know that many of you want to use cross-platform engines to build your games and deploy them in all the places that gamers care about – Xbox, Windows, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii, iOS, Android and more. Now, there is an amazing ecosystem of game frameworks and engines that support building games on Windows and across all platforms.
If you are looking to port your existing XNA game to Windows 10 UWP, please explore the MonoGame framework, which is an open-source, cross-platform implementation of XNA, supporting Windows 10 UWP and a variety of other platforms. If you are looking to build a cross-platform game using C#, .NET and Visual Studio, you can explore Unity, a powerful 3D and 2D game creation tool and ecosystem. Unreal Engine 4 and Cocos2d are also great options for building cross-platforms games using Visual Studio.
In addition, if your game was built with XNA and previously worked on Windows or Windows Phone, it will continue to work.
I have to admit this is somewhat depressing as I was always a fan of XNA. Not surprising, but depressing.