Is .NET Relevant to Game Developers?

andrew stuart asks: "We've heard an awful lot about how .NET is the future and how .NET signals the end for COM based Windows development, but how far does this go? Is it really the end of COM? Will ALL Windows programming be done with .NET? What about games development? Will games be developed with .NET? If games aren't developed with .NET and Microsoft is killing COM, then what future for games development on Windows? Will there be DirectX for .NET?"

Comments

Doubtful.

[Sheetrock]

It's not like we've even figured out what the hell .NET is yet, right? I've played around a bit with C# (both Microsoft and Ximian versions) and thought, well, this is great but where is this going to take us that Java hasn't? It's important not to get caught up in the buzzwords, the hype, or the marketing ploy to redefine the paradigm. For example, just the other day while I was enjoying a meal of Hunan Chicken I was reflecting on the history of chopsticks, and the humor in the whole situation of people getting pretentious in their ability to use them. Aren't people aware that the things were invented in America in the 1800s by Chinese immigrants seeking to differentiate their restaurants in the mining communities? But this is just another situation where marketing has gained such a foothold that myth becomes historical fact, amusingly so when you realize that chopstick use in Asia now far outstrips American chopstick use and that something like 1% of all our lumber exports go towards manufacturing wooden chopsticks. It's easy to carve new markets out of ignorance, but it doesn't imply relevancy -- far from it. You can slap .NET on a game, but it still comes down to the fundamentals: does it run, is it fun, does your player have a gun? I don't see anything in the toolset that will make development any simpler, and in fact think it'll make it harder to create something that works properly and properly exploits all this expensive hardware people are packing into their systems nowadays.