It's always a gamble and it depends on a lot of specifics. I thought XNA would've stuck around a little longer, especially given the new console that Microsoft is supposed to be releasing this year, I felt it would've been prudent for them to keep it around so that people can write the newest Xbox games right away.
In the case of Silverlight, I remember thinking to myself about how I would wait on it to see how it fared given the saturation of Flash everywhere else, and see how widespread the adoption was going to be. If I decided to dedicate myself to learning Silverlight I'd be very disappointed.
My gut feeling is that Durango will be able to play Windows Store games, possibly with a recompile to a slightly different platform target. So I expect there will still be a pathway.
There's still the expectation that people use C++/CX, which is terrible, but I think the "indie" path will be pretty well-formed.
The product is the method. This is also true of MMOs, what would happen if you removed the xp bar from those games? The 'game' would practically cease to exist.
Sorry, I sometimes make assumptions that many if not most of the people here have had at least some exposure to the language used in data security policies.
sorry, i probably shouldn't have replied. difficult to know whether the context is "quickly help me understand what this means" or "give me a precise answer", but for the web, with a technical audience, i should lean more towards the latter...
I kept meaning to write a blog post about it, but it kept getting pushed back. Short story is: we got a decent number of users signed up, but no one was willing to pay money, everyone just wanted to get paid to play games. And by "no one", I truly mean 0%. A few weeks in, the server died and when I brought it back up, I decided not to restore the site (I had backups) but rather keep it down and rebrand it a bit, in hopes of making it clearer and more appealing to people. But I ended up getting way too busy with work and all that, and that never happened.
I opened the source a while back; it'd be cool if someone took it and actually made it successful, but I have serious doubts that it could ever work. I always knew that few users would be willing to pay money for in-game help, but capturing those few turned out to be harder than I thought.
hi - just wanted to say i loved your blog post, I am taking a look at setting up a prototype of pigstream just to get a feel for Ruby and Heroku. It is going well though I got stuck at installing the dependencies for the project. (bundle install...erm wat)Ill figure it out soon. All good fun though!
Hey there -- if the `bundle install` command isn't working when you are in the repo, you probably need the bundler gem installed, which is kind of like a package manager for ruby project deps. Just do `gem install bundler` and you should be able to run commands with it afterwards. Feel free to email me if you need any help!
