14 DAY TRIAL // Considered an operating system that could change the world, Windows 8 is nothing more than a gaming catastrophe, Valve boss Gabe Newell said a few months ago.
Now that Windows 8 is already on the market and some things have changed, you may be tempted to believe that Microsoft has worked with game developers on the things they had previously found outrageous.
Well, it did not, so developers still believe that Windows 8 is quite bad for the gaming industry, especially due to its closed gaming marketplace.
“I actually think Gabe might have seen the internal email that I sent here on Windows 8,” Miles Jacobson, boss of Football Manager developer Sports Interactive, told Eurogamer.
The brand new Windows Store service bundled into Windows 8 allows users to purchase apps directly from their operating system, without launching any other platform. It could obviously be a real threat for Steam, so Windows Store isn’t quite welcome in the gaming industry.
“Microsoft is definitely headed that way. Thinking ahead to Windows 9 or 10 you can see them asking you to have the Windows 9 Ultimate Edition to let you install non-Windows Store software,” Jacobson added.
Alen Ladavac, chief technology officer at Serious Sam developer Croteam, said Valve boss Gabe Newell was right when he explained that Windows 8 is a gaming catastrophe and warned that Microsoft’s direction is pretty worrying. Soon, users may not be allowed to install other apps beside the ones available in the Windows Store, he stated.
“A large number of developers have expressed their concern with [the] possibility that, probably in Windows 9 or something like that, the ability to get even desktop apps in any other way than through Windows Store may very well be removed. When that happens it will be too late,” he explained.