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If one thing has become clear from the way Microsoft has handled the launch and updates of the Xbox One, the launch of Windows 10 and its latest push for smartphone acceptance, it wants to build a single, unified Windows platform. Epic co-founder Tim Sweeney however, thinks that's a horrible idea and represents Microsoft's attempt to lock down the traditionally open, PC platform.
“With its new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative, Microsoft has built a closed platform-within-a-platform into Windows 10, as the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem,” Sweeney said in a piece written in The Guardian.
Throughout the rest of the piece he goes on the attack, claiming that Microsoft is declaring war on publishers, developers and platform providers, in an attempt to force people to use its Windows app store, by benefiting those that do, and disadvantaging those that don't.
This animosity might seem surprising considering Microsoft and Epic Games have worked together on big exclusives like Gears of War in the past, but that merely shows how much Sweeney fears what Microsoft is planning. The fact that the recent Gears of War: Ultimate Edition re-release on PC has been disastrous in many ways, probably didn't help.
Sweeney goes on to point out specific complaints in his piece, stating that part of the issue is that the Unified Windows Platform (UWP) stops you being able to update or use applications outside of its shopfront. He wants that to end, as well as the locking out of other platform providers.
Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on PC ran into a lot of visual and performance issues. Source: ExtremeTech
Perhaps the most egregious part of the whole thing though, according to Sweeney, is that the service offered to consumers is a poor one. Months on after its launch, the Windows Store lacks most top-tier, popular games from major publishers and developers. How can Microsoft pretend to operate a high-level distribution service if the content on it doesn't represent what people want?
To fix this, Sweeney says he wants a guarantee that Microsoft will not restrict other marketplaces and that it will not force a 30 per cent cut of sales on everyone who wants to sell anything through Windows. It all needs to be obvious too, no deliberate hiding or obfuscation.
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KitGuru Says: These are the kinds of concerns we all had before Windows 10 launched last year. As much as it is a neat OS, the real concern was what would come next. Would Microsoft lock it down even more with Windows 11? The UWP threatens that. Are you willing to fight it?
figured it was windows way of being more like apple, guess they don’t have the ravenous fan-base to support all their horrible decisions.
From my perspective:
We PC gamers were burned pretty badly by MS back around the launch of win vista. Halo and Gears of War, games seemingly targeted at the pc market, suddenly disappeared from the platform and became xbox exclusives. We were given Games for Windows Live – the software equivalent of smallpox. Nevermind the hassle vista itself was at launch for gamers, making most stick with win xp.
Now we’re here at the launch of win 10 and the windows store. MS is hoping for a second chance with the pc community, but the problem is, the pc gaming community has a tendancy to hold a grudge and aren’t ones for second chances. And as I said, we got burned, badly by MS before. When the store launched with a myriad of issues (windowed fullscreen, forced v-sync, no mod support, no overlay support, no crossfire/sli to name but a few), did they really believe that this was an acceptable state to present their new platform to us in with the level of distrust we already had for them? Did they honestly believe we would all overlook their past behavior and the atrocious launch of the windows store by simply promising to “look into fixing things”.
MS made fools of pc gamers in the past – they’re not being given the chance to this time, and this shoddy launch might kill their universal platform before it can even take off.
Hmm, when the time comes for me to develop software/games, I will be mostly looking into a cross-platform (Linux, Windows 10, 8, 7 and Mac) development, and no, nothing id put on Windows Store. If all devs are to do that, you would see how MS would be really scratching their desks and thinking, whatever they do, nothing would work – and that’s what should happen. MS should taste big defeats in the market.
He do not attack UWP as unification platform, but as tool to enforce greediness and monopoly.
Don’t waste your reputation to be MS loyal puppet
Here is the TLDR on the entire move for you short sighted folks.
Consoles are dying :
Hardware can’t keep up and the entire model of a “refresh” falling arbitrarily to a console vendor is insane. The Industry needs to speed up it’s rate of evolution as the short cycle industries like mobile are catching ground fast. There will only be PCs in the future. Windows10 / xboxos (console windows) and dx12. Same API across both with a shared experience / store / servers.
With cloud computing and improvements to wireless technology and the such we can see the very concept of user hardware slowly changing into a cloud delivered model going forward too. GPU virtualisation etc is only the beginning of this all.
Microsoft are clueless and a legacy company:
Microsoft trying to strong arm its way into the PC platform leveraging its monopoly on gaming OS and API monopoly with dx11. Understanding the future past the next xbox is non existent, microsoft are clearly scrambling to do the only thing it can do. What it already knows to do. Legacy Legacy Legacy.
Holding us all back to work their own greed based agendas has gone on long enough tbh.
This company can’t die soon enough……
Good on Tim Sweeney for fighting the good fight!
Nope, difference is Microsoft grew up as a thing u needed for a pc, not a brand as such, where apple was lucky, they became a brand and people buy brands because of the brand not the quality of what they sell (to a certain degree of cause).
Microsoft still have to fight on the brand market, and take a beating when do bad, apple just waddle in and fans roll around and expose their Tommies.
I think it’s less greed and more incompetence. Steam is greedy, it makes a shit ton of money. They’re just not incompetent. That’s why everyone loves steam. If Microsoft just made a better steam, they would make a lot more money than trying to push gimped games on their stupid UWP platform.
You are justs elf projecting. nothing but greed exists on the corporate scale. They are required by law to pursue maximum profits for their shareholders…