In an email to XNA/DirectX Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) yesterday, Microsoft gave notice that MVP status was being phased out for program members. According to the missive, this is being done because “the XNA Game Studio is not in active development and DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology.”

XNA was Microsoft’s toolset for cross-platform game development between the Xbox 360, Zune (when applicable), Windows Phone 7, and PC titles. It debuted in 2004 and was used by a number of small developers/indie titles that were later made available on Xbox Live. As Promit Roy, CTO of Action Labs, points out, this is scarcely a surprise. XNA has lagged behind developments on the PC side for years and wasn’t capable of targeting DirectX 10 or 11 feature sets despite the former being over six years old.

The comment on DirectX is more startling, and in Roy’s view, poorly worded. Tech enthusiasts tend to treat “DirectX” as synonymous with “Direct3D,” but they aren’t the same thing. Direct3D continues to change and adapt, but it’s been effectively folded into Windows 8. As Roy notes “Direct3D has been absorbed into Windows core, and thus is no more a ‘technology’ than GDI or Winsock.”

Toolset deprecation and API shifts aren’t normally big news if you aren’t a programmer, but there are other factors in play. Microsoft is expected to launch the Xbox 360’s successor between the end of 2013 and early 2014. XNA was a useful component of Xbox 360 development (it was announced in 2004, 18 months before the Xbox 360 shipped). So what’s supposed to take its place? Microsoft doesn’t currently have an answer. Last year, MS made waves when it announced that Metro Windows 8 User Experience applications (does anyone actually call it that, ever?) would depend on HTML, JavaScript, and XAML.

In reality the situation is far more complex, but that diagram launched a lot of questions about the future of Windows development and just how much of a headache developers would face if they wanted to move the Desktop side of the equation over to Metro-style applications.

Then Microsoft decided Visual Studio Express 2012 wouldn’t support anything but Metro-style applications. If you wanted to compile applications for Desktop, you had to pay for the Professional Edition. The company reversed this stance after major consumer outcry, but it was another misstep from a corporation that lauded itself on putting developers first.

It’s not particularly surprising that Microsoft killed XNA, given how the company has treated it in recent years. What’s unusual — or, at least, what would’ve been unusual once upon a time — is that there’s no clearly articulated follow-up. There’s no information on what developers should expect in the future, if anything. Given that XNA was apparently successful at simplifying and promoting cross-platform development, that’s a bit odd.

Are there alternatives? Absolutely. But Microsoft’s developer support was a key factor in the Xbox 360’s early success over the PS3. There are other options for game development besides XNA, but there’s no data on what current XNA devs should plan to do if they want to develop games for the Xbox 720/Durango. Even if D3D is still in development, calling DirectX moribund isn’t exactly positive. It’s not like D3D itself couldn’t stand some major improvement; the API’s overhead in the PC space is a huge part of why consoles are able to effectively keep pace with PCs years after their internal hardware is thoroughly outdated.

Microsoft blames AMD and Nvidia for some of this. AMD and NV blame Microsoft. End users are stuck with bottlenecks and communication on resolving said issues has dwindled to nothing. At this point, it seems as though even Microsoft has no real idea how XNA users and cross-platform developers should think about the future of game development in Windows beyond “Let’s roll it all into one package.” It’s ludicrous to think the company would jeopardize its programming advantages ahead of its next-generation console launch, but absent better communication, that’s the way things look.

Updated: Microsoft has emailed Promit Roy to say that the first email was in error, and that “DirectX is evolving and will continue to evolve.” Like Roy, though, we’re still musing as to why it took a leaked email for Microsoft to clarify its stance on DX and XNA.