Presskit | MonoGame

Fact Sheet

Foundation Date:
September 29th, 2023

Supported Platforms
Windows
Mac
Linux
iOS
iPadOS
Android
Xbox
PlayStation 4
PlayStation 5
Nintendo Switch

MonoGame is an open source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4.0 Framework. It is a "bring your own tools" kind of framework. This means it provides you with the building blocks to build your own engine and tools, but isn't quite an engine itself.

If you love coding and understanding how things work under the hood, MonoGame might be what you are looking for.

History

In 2009 José Antonio Leal de Farias, an active member of the XNA community, started an open source project called XNA Touch with the goal of porting simple 2D XNA games to mobile devices. He started from Bill Reiss's SilverSprite and some bits of Mono.XNA and in December 2009 the first release which only supported iPhone was posted on Codeplex.

Over 2010 several iPhone games appeared on the Apple App Store which used XNA Touch.

In March 2011 the project was renamed MonoGame and was moved to GitHub. That same year support for Android, Mac, Linux, and OpenGL on Windows appeared. Dominique Louis who joined the project in 2009 took over as the full time project lead.

Early 2012 saw the addition of the DirectX 11 backend and support for Windows 8 providing the first and currently only way to port XNA games to the Windows Store. This subsequently spawned support for Windows Phone 8 and a new Windows desktop platform. This same year MonoGame team was invited to speak at Microsoft's //Build 2012 event.

Microsoft Studios published several titles using MonoGame in 2013 on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. 2013 also saw the announcement of the first MonoGame titles coming to PlayStation 4 including TowerFall Ascension, Transistor, and Mercenary Kings.

In early 2014 stewardship of the MonoGame project was handed off to Tom Spilman and Steve Williams

On September 29th, 2023, the MonoGame Foundation was established to direct the future of the project.