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Does C# have a future in games development?

Presently I'm learning c++ and in starting stage of opengl . My ultimate goal is to be game programmer. I want to stick with c++ but my doubt is how important is to learn c# or XNA? What's their future compared to c++ in game development? What about the career prospective?

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marked as duplicate by Byte56, Kylotan, Josh Petrie, Nicol Bolas, Noctrine Jun 4 '12 at 19:42


c# is alot easier and is a great language; but if you are making good progress with c++ and are enjoying yourself, don't worry about c#. c++ is the industry standard, and is the most useful language to know. Plus, the knowledge of one language is easily transferable to the other –  Aralox Jun 3 '12 at 6:01

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up vote 3 down vote accepted

According to Microsoft (Herb Sutter talks at build), as hardware gets more mobile (tablets & phones) we are suddenly facing hardware that lacks performance compared to our laptops and PCs. This makes the performance of software more important. A less performant language may come up against the hardware's performance boundry sooner.

C#, although considered higher rated in productivity than c++, generaly runs at a performance handicap to c++.

Since it is felt than in the coming years performance will outweigh productivity in software development due to hardware going mobile, Microsoft seems to be putting c# game development on the back burner and turning the heat up on c++ game development.

It is unclear whether we will see another update to Xna. Most likely Xna development will not be a part of windows phone 8. Since Xna was not invited to be a part of WinRT, it leaves us wondering if it will be invited to the next xbox.

I'm sure the AAA game studios are content using c++ for the forseeable future.

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