Tim Sweeney blasts Microsoft's "aggressive UWP initiative"
Epic co-founder says program is designed to turn PC into a closed platform; Microsoft responds, "UWP is a fully open ecosystem"
Epic co-founder Tim Sweeney has written a remarkable column for UK paper The Guardian, calling out Microsoft for what he says is a prolonged and focused attack on the open nature of the PC platform.
Sweeney's ire is directed at the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), Microsoft's new standard for running games across Xbox, PC and Windows phone. That standard, Sweeney says, is nothing more than "the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem and monopolising app distribution and commerce."
"In my view, this is the most aggressive move Microsoft has ever made," he writes. "While the company has been convicted of violating antitrust law in the past, its wrongful actions were limited to fights with specific competitors and contracts with certain PC manufacturers.
" Here, Microsoft is moving against the entire PC industry - including consumers (and gamers in particular), software developers such as Epic Games, publishers like EA and Activision, and distributors like Valve and Good Old Games"
"This isn't like that. Here, Microsoft is moving against the entire PC industry - including consumers (and gamers in particular), software developers such as Epic Games, publishers like EA and Activision, and distributors like Valve and Good Old Games.
"Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP, and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem. They're curtailing users' freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers."
The UWP concept has been building momentum for a while, believes Sweeney, but has recently become too blatant to ignore. Comments from Xbox head Phil Spencer at last month's Spring Showcase around the future of the Xbox platform and cross platform play certainly indicate that Microsoft is seriously reconfiguring its approach to software and the PC market, a move which is seen to be part and parcel of the larger shift towards a more curated and controlled access to games on Windows as a broader platform.
"Microsoft's intentions must be judged by Microsoft's actions, not Microsoft's words," Sweeney continues. "Their actions speak plainly enough: they are working to turn today's open PC ecosystem into a closed, Microsoft-controlled distribution and commerce monopoly, over time, in a series of steps of which we're seeing the very first. Unless Microsoft changes course, all of the independent companies comprising the PC ecosystem have a decision to make: to oppose this, or cede control of their existing customer relationships and commerce to Microsoft's exclusive control."
"Their actions speak plainly enough: they are working to turn today's open PC ecosystem into a closed, Microsoft-controlled distribution and commerce monopoly"
Whilst Sweeney concedes there are settings which control much of what currently funnels Windows users towards using Microsoft's other products, such as Bing, they're often obscured and unclear, designed to obfuscate and confuse. Sweeney compares the approach to Google's similar stance on the Play Store.
"Microsoft has certainly followed this lead in technically exposing, but practically burying, options that let users escape from its force-bundled services. If you've tried to change your Windows 10 search engine, web browser, or movie player, or to turn off their invasive new lock-screen ads, Windows search bar Bing spam, and invasive 'analytics', you know what I'm talking about. It's a deliberately anti-customer experience: the options are there, but good luck finding them.
"The ultimate danger here is that Microsoft continually improves UWP while neglecting and even degrading win32, over time making it harder for developers and publishers to escape from Microsoft's new UWP commerce monopoly."
Update: Microsoft has responded to the arguments laid out by Epic's Tim Sweeney. Kevin Gallo, corporate vice president of Windows at Microsoft, issued the following statement to The Guardian:
The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX required.
We want to make Windows the best development platform regardless of technologies used, and offer tools to help developers with existing code bases of HTML/JavaScript, .NET and Win32, C+ + and Objective-C bring their code to Windows, and integrate UWP capabilities. With Xamarin, UWP developers can not only reach all Windows 10 devices, but they can now use a large percentage of their C# code to deliver a fully native mobile app experiences for iOS and Android.
Yup. SteamOS still isn't great, apparently, but things would be far worse if Valve hadn't seen this happening and started moving against it.
It's not even like the consumer wants any of what MS is selling - for all the complaints about Steam being a "monopoly" and how bad uPlay is, PC gaming has never been as open or as exciting as it is now. No-one wants the company that tried and failed to get Games For Windows Live going to succeed here.
Speaking far less emotively, I cannot see EA or Ubisoft or Acti/Blizzard looking favourably at this. EA, who would rather lose sales than give 30% of revenue to Valve, getting behind an MS-run store? Like hell! :D Blizzard, who have resolutely done their own thing with Battle.net? Pffft.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Morville O'Driscoll on 4th March 2016 12:10pm
"Of course UWP is an open platform, we let ANYONE sign up and hand over 30% of their royalties, submit to our review process and make it harder to take their products elsewhere!"
This is very reminiscent of their argument that bundling IE wasn't anti-competitive because OEMs could *also* include other browsers (at their own cost, and not instead of IE). And we all know how that worked out for them.
Trying to force people to use a store that for years they've failed to attract anyone to use by choice will be a catastrophically expensive misadventure.
Here's four statements. The first is Tim Sweeney on MS:
Tim Sweeney again:
Valve:
And finally, Valve again:
It's worth reading all of the Steamworks page and brochure, actually, to get a sense of how much Valve provide (whilst simultaneously being able to avoid giving Valve a single penny).
Edited 3 times. Last edit by Morville O'Driscoll on 4th March 2016 4:24pm
I'm not clear on whether the thing to be worried about here is that UWP is required for the new store, or that Win32 may be deprecated in the future, or whether Windows OS features will be given some kind of UWP 'exclusivity' (another variant of the Win32 second-class-citizen worry)?
Or a combination of the above?
Can someone clarify?
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Nick McCrea on 4th March 2016 4:39pm
Deprecating features (due to "security concerns") is already a sort-of issue, considering that Rise of the Tomb Raider and Quantum Break are on the store now, and, due to UWP and its permissions, .DLL hooks are difficult (if not impossible) to place - so, FRAPS, Riva-Tuner, GeDoSaTo, Mumble, etc can't be used. Durante has said that if Dark Souls were a UWP program, he couldn't have released DSFix, since it requires hooking into the main .exe. Win32 .exes are obviously non-existent in UWP apps. The reason why the Steam Controller has restricted use with UWP apps is due to the Steam Overlay being required, so whilst it's not a specific Win32 deprecation (or it may be, actually?), it is a move-backwards.
(From PC Gaming Shakeup: Ashes of the Singularity, DX12 and the Microsoft Store )
And this is before we get into modding in the true sense. Two posts from NeoGAF, by Durante, sum this up:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=195219746&postcount=1703
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=195220397&postcount=1714
Hope this helps. :) There's a lot to dig into with UWP and the issues it presents. Reading the NeoGAF thread those two posts above are taken from is useful (but it is NeoGAF, so... :p )
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Morville O'Driscoll on 4th March 2016 5:16pm
If this is true, I don't see the big deal. Sure, UWP is required for Windows Store, but if any store can add support for UWP, then I don't see the problem.
That being said, I don't think WinAPI will go away. Windows is popular because it can run old apps, MS won't be that stupid and remove the most important feature of the OS: backward compatibility. Specially when they are adding backward compatibility to XB1...
Thanks for that.
I can see why people are getting concerned, though like Sergio I'm inclined to believe MS will calibrate developer and consumer feedback on this very carefully before committing any cardinal sins. At least I hope they will!
Something to bear in mind with this shift to UWP is future compatibility. Unless MS is in the UWP business for the literal long-haul (and I do mean long), then future iterations of Windows may not have the ability to play Windows 10 Store releases. This would be almost unprecedented in terms of PC gaming. Right now, I can load SCUMM and play LucasArts adventures from 30 years ago. I can load DOSBox and play a shareware version of Doom from 20+ years ago (hell, the Steam version of Doom uses DOSBox). I can do this because of the open-ended nature of PC applications upto now.
Unless Microsoft fervently believes that UWP is the future of gaming, my fear is that any game released solely on the Windows 10 store will be rendered incompatible in the future. And if you think me paranoid, Games For Windows Live games that were not released anywhere else are currently difficult (if not entirely impossible) to download and play, since MS shuttered the service entirely. Viva Piñata, from 2009, for example, or Bulletstorm from 2011. Both actually impossible to play.
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Morville O'Driscoll on 4th March 2016 6:20pm
Before you buy into Microsoft's latest PC gaming initiative, try to remember GFW. Not the podcast, the actual thing.
If that is not enough to calm you down, there is always the option to fork some Linux version and brand it with your company's name. You could even use that fork to create bootable plastic discs you put into the PC before turning it on and live the console dream on home PCs.
If Windows goes that way, I think Linux will be there to take on all the people who want to jump ship and stay with a more open platform. We'll see!