Valve Software founder Gabe Newell made waves in the game space recently when he called Windows 8 “a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.” Rob Pardo, executive vice president at Blizzard Software, has chimed in with some agreement. He posted this message to Twitter on Wednesday:
nice interview with Gabe Newell – “I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space* – not awesome for Blizzard either
Newell is concerned that Microsoft is moving to a closed platform with Windows 8. The company plans to integrate a Windows Store that will enable people to buy software directly from Microsoft, with Microsoft retaining a 30 percent cut of the sale — similar to Apple’s approach with the iOS and Mac App Stores.
Pardo’s comments are his own and not necessarily reflective of a corporate position from the makers of StarCraft II, World of Warcraft and Diablo 3. But they would seem to indicate growing discontent from some leading game developers about the future direction of Windows.
I smell government lawsuits….
Steam is a closed eco system, Battle.net is a closed Eco system. WTF?
If I understand Pardo and Newell correctly, their main point of contention is that MS going to the Apple model of app delivery. I don’t hear them complain about Apple. Maybe because MacOS is such a small part of their business.
It is interesting that MS would never have tried something like before because of antitrust concerns. But now that Apple has paved the way, they are trying see if they can get away with getting a 30% cut on a good share of all Windows PC software.
Isn’t one of the issues that Metro requires brand new code? With the Mac App store you might need to modify your code to meet Apple’s requirements, but if you have a game, you can essentially still submit the same code. For Metro, you’re recoding.
I prefer to play wow on my mac anyway. The video and audio options are soooo much better. And it feels more stable.
I doubt it.
Is MS restricting apps to only be available via their app store? From what I understand, no. Windows 8 would be guaranteed to fail if that was the case. (They might be able to pull it off for the ARM processor version, but not for the full Intel processor version)
Even if MS did try to do it. I doubt there’d be a legal leg to stand on. Windows is still big, but no where as dominant as it was during the 90’s, so the anti-trust side of things is weaker than it had been.
And the app store only business model is legal in and of itself (not only iOS, but in a roundabout way, all the major console games have to be approved and give a cut of the proceeds to the console manufacturers.
Microsoft makes the messaging confusing with their branding. In this discussion ( I think ) we are talking about traditional Windows 8 applications (Intel based) on regular PC’s and not Windows 8 RT (ARM based) on tablets.
Like MacOS traditional Windows 8 (intel) apps should be pretty much the same whether it is from the vendor or from the Microsoft APP store.