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

I worked at a place called Newfire in the late 90's. Before funding ran dry, we had an engine that could render an immersive world that was 10,000 square km with a resolution of 10 cm. You could get a huge number of players in at once and persistently deform the landscape. This engine ran at frame rate on a P200 with a Voodoo 2 card.

Most of the engine was written in carefully tuned C++. All the game code was written in C or C++ or Java. I also had prototype code that could define object behaviors using a push down automata that could do very decent AI. It took nearly no CPU time. The execution of game logic was dwarfed by rendering.

At one point, I had a demo of Conway's Game of Life running in Java using our software renderer. The cells were cubes laid in a plane which appeared or disappeared and changed color as they aged more generations. While the game was running with a fixed generation rate of 4 generations per second, the 3D display was running at 20+ FPS, again on a P200 with the software renderer.

So the answer is not definitely C++. The answer, like any problem domain, is the language that works the best within that domain. C++ works well in that domain for the rendering engine, but for the actual game logic and rules, lots of languages work well. Python is great. C# is great. Java is great.