While Windows 8 had little to offer PC gamers, Windows 10 with DirectX 12 is a different story. True, there are no games taking advantage of the new API, but a few should be arriving soon. So, does Microsoft have any more surprises up its sleeve for the trusty platform? Not really.
Ian Dransfield over at PC Gamer recently spoke to Microsoft’s Kevin Unangst at Gamescom and asked him a number of questions regarding the company’s plans, now that Windows 10 is in the wild. The first topic that came up was the ill-fated Games for Windows Live, which died a slow death and was never appreciated by, well, anyone:
“Games for Windows was a prior approach where it was more, at that time, like ‘how do we take things?’” he said, “We knew we wanted to help make great multiplayer, we knew we wanted to bring things over… but it wasn’t the right approach. It was the approach of ‘let’s just take those things and transplant them’.”
It seems Microsoft learned its lesson — I doubt it’ll be jumping into that particular arena for a while… if ever.
Dransfield also queried Unangst about the Windows Store ever being a competitor to Steam. As far as Microsoft is concerned, there are no plans to steal users away from Steam. No, it wants to take a gentle approach:
“If anything, we want Steam to be even more successful — they’ve done great things for PC gamers in terms of having a single store.”
Unangst goes on to say that although competition is good, it has no plans to usurp Steam’s dominant position. I can’t even begin to imagine how it would go about doing that — maybe use GfWL as a template and then do exactly the opposite thing?
Games for Windows “wasn’t the right approach” says Microsoft [PC Gamer]
Comments
4 responses to “Microsoft Is Happy To Just Support PC Gaming For Now”
If they really cared about pc gaming we would be getting halo.
If they really cared about PC gaming, we wouldn’t. We’d be seeing more games made for PC and not console ports.
^^ Much prefer new IP’s or PC sequels than a port for a console dominant game.
*Shrug* I’d like both… 🙂 Halo is rad, and so are new IPs….