Viability of C#/.NET as the new standard game dev platform?

Question

For a long time now C++ has been the dominate game development language. Many AAA quality 3D engines are available to fit any budget.

My question is, with the rise of X

Answer 1

While some time ago XNA Professional was announced, Microsoft now seems to focus on the Express edition (though it lost the "Express" in the name), and that seems to be aimed at the hobbyist market rather than the commercial market. Among other things, this largely benefits the XBox 360 community, because they now allow hobbyist developers to develop their games for Windows and XBox 360 and then to sell their games on the XBox network, and that is a good thing.

I'd really love to see XNA gaining momentum in the professional world, but this won't happen unless it's available for the other major gaming platforms (PS3 and Wii). The problem is not only the XNA framework / API, it's the language / framework requirement, so you can't even write the game in C# and then use XNA on Microsoft platforms and OpenGL on other platforms.

The performance profile of XNA is also aimed at the hobbyist market rather than commercial, though the performance seems to be quite good and there are impressive demos out in the wild.

Edit:

If your question is actually "should I use XNA now for my project with a budget much less than a million", my answer is definitely yes. Go try it out, it's free. And it's powerful.