September 26, 2006

[XNA] XNA and VB

One downside about having a ton of different topics in your blog is that it is very difficult to extract out meaningful data from search queries. For example, none of the queries currently hitting my site account for more than 1.2% of the total queries.

That said, some items are bubbling to the top. People want XNA. XNA-related queries currently account for more than 30% of the search engine queries that hit my site.

The number one XNA-related query is "xna vb." I think that speaks for itself, but I think it's more telling that "xna vb" has four times as many people looking for it than they do for "xna basiceffect" (essentially the fixed-function replacement inside the XNA Framework), has almost as many queries as all of the piracy-related search queries that hit my site (quite a lot, really), and has twice as many queries as people looking for Vista compatibility information.

Something tells me that the XNA team may want to rethink their message. Right now, the message being communicated is "We're aware of the VB problem, and are looking at ways to solve it." The message isn't that there's a VB problem...the true message is that VB is the market.

1 comment:

Michael Russell said...

My counter-argument would be that both should be equally supported.

They need C# to be fully supported in order to be taken seriously by the professional game development community. C# has made major inroads inside professional game development companies over the last five years for use with tools and even prototyping to a limited extent.

That said, the majority of the "hobbyist game developers with money" would would spring $800 for XNA Game Studio Professional are the VB crowd.

Even though I can code in C++ with ease and happen to enjoy some of the language features in C#, I still consider myself a VB guy. I probably always will. Even though VB has evolved far from its roots, it just feels friendlier as a language.