At the end of February at a press event in San Francisco, Phil Spencer, head of the Xbox division announced Microsoft’s upcoming gaming strategy. Phil Spencer said that Microsoft is planning to unify various platforms, including PC and Xbox gaming platforms into one ecosystem running Universal Windows Applications (UWA). Microsoft plans to release the Universal Windows Platform so you can access all of your UWA’s in one place across all of your devices.
So what does this UWP look like and what does it mean for both PC and Xbox gamers? Another big announcement by Phil Spencer is that the Xbox One will become more “PC-like” with compatible hardware upgrades in the future. What does this statement mean for Xbox One gamers? These are the questions we will look at in this post.
Firstly, if you have read our bio’s you’ll know that I am primarily a PC gamer, my gaming rig isn’t the best and has some components that are almost 5 years old. I also have a PS4, PS Vita and an Xbox One so I do consider myself a multi-platform gamer and will have access to every major release and the console and first party exclusives. I prefer to play any game on the PC platform as I find the mouse and keyboard configuration more comfortable and the smoothness of the display, there are a few exceptions to this of course, for racing, fighting and hack & slash games I use my XB1 controller.
What is the UWP??? It appears that Microsoft will launch its “Windows Store” on all forms of Windows run devices and is already live on Windows 10. Speaking of Windows 10, Microsoft states that you will only be able to share content through this version, so if you have Windows 7 or 8 then you cannot enjoy the concept of shared content. Microsoft produces quite a few electronic products including tablets, mobile phones, the surface pro (a blend of tablet and personal computer) and the Xbox console. Currently Xbox has the “Live Store” where you can purchase digital content and play it on the console. In the future Microsoft is aiming to monopolise the gaming markets on PC by introducing cross platform content that you can purchase on either Windows Store or the Live Store and theoretically play the content on Xbox and PC (as long as your PC can run the content), but there is a problem with this concept!
I recently read a great article, which Ill link below, by Peter “Durante” Thoman on the PC Gamer website, where he gives some really specific problems that can arise if games become universal apps, I will attempt to put his knowledge into layman’s term so we can all understand what he is on about.
Win32 is a set of programming configurations and well as an executable format that has existed for over 20 years, since the inception of modern computing. “Why are you spouting this nonsense Rob” and “What does this have to do with gaming”?? Well “this nonsense” is important because it’s how games are installed and executed, so we can explore their files, mod them, patch them and play them. Apps are not installed using Win32 but instead are only installed once Microsoft has accepted your purchase and acts as a gatekeeper. “What’s the problem with that?” I hear you say, well if you want to modify any files that enable the game to run you cannot if it’s an app, only Microsoft or the publisher can. PC gamers, how many times have you fiddled with an .ini file to get your game to run well?? Do you like modding your games, ARMA, X-COM, Total War series, Borderlands the list goes on and on well if Microsoft gets its way then this will stop because you won’t have access to the files to change, neither will mod makers. If your game doesn’t work properly you’ll have to wait until Microsoft or the developer releases a patch and we all know how long that can take and we also know the state some games are released. If games become apps there will be no more looking at forums or boards for fixes, you’ll just be stuck with a broken game until a patch is released!
The next problem is running the game, which we will assume is an app for this example. No exclusive full screen mode for UWA’s!!! That’s not a problem, it’s only the way we have been playing PC games for decades!!! Companies like Nvidia and AMD have spent time and money researching technologies and drivers that will work best in full screen mode, also Nvidia has G-Sync a monitor that effectively sync’s with your Nvidia graphics card to give you the best possible resolution and highest graphical settings without sacrificing screen tearing or artefacting (stretched textures from a single point spreading outwards across the screen). Overall this may seem inconsequential next to the above comments but it will all add up to be a bad experience.
Interoperability, nope I have no idea what this is either! It’s a big word and a bit of a mouthful but it is important for other programs that work with, or alongside a video game. Anyone who records their gameplay, streams their gameplay, or runs a performance monitoring program to measure their performance and squeeze every little watt of power out of their components will run into trouble with games that become apps. Another type of program that isn’t ‘interoperable’ with apps is a VOIP program. Voice over Internet Protocol programs allow users to communicate with others whilst playing games, programs like TeamSpeak and Mumble that might display an overlay or use game data by using a keyboard input will often interfere with the apps functionality, basically the app will misbehave and probably crash. Other very common uses of interoperability are the various overlays used by game distribution services, like steam. When one of your friends logon and play a game you get a little popup in the corner of your screen telling you who they are and what game they are playing. Now I’m not the biggest fan of these popups and I have disabled them, however Steam still performs the action every time a buddy of mine plays a game, I just don’t see it. Now if my game was an app then every time someone starts up one of their games my game may misbehave and crash, imagine how pissed you’ll be if your game crashes every 5 minutes and you crash your friends games constantly, nobody would be friends online, and Microsoft encourages social gaming. I don’t think they have thought this through!!
Lastly is the problem with modding or reconfiguring restrictions. There is a website called GOG, or Good Old Games which updates old game files, repackages them allowing them to work on newer technologies. GOG is a great site and I have found some real pleasure and joy playing some of the older titles that offer much more content than today’s AAA titles for a fraction of the price. Not only does GOG offer players older games, it offers them all without the hotly debated DRM modes (always online), thus you can play any GOG released game without an internet connection checking with the distributor first. If UWA’s come to fruition then they may not be playable in years to come, due to their being no access to the apps files, furthermore a lot of gamers use a interjecting tool to inject post processing effects into games. A recent example of this is Fallout 4, where many gamers used ReShade to sharpen the details of the game after enabling Anti-Aliasing in the games visual options. Without anti-aliasing being enabled objects in the game looked jagged and odd, which is why anti-aliasing was developed in the first place.
All of the points I have raised above needed research and were not entirely my own opinion but rather information I have put into my own words. Now I would like to look at previous attempts of Microsoft to enter the PC gaming market and how they have tried to make an increased profit and failed doing so. Any PC gamer will remember Games for Windows Live! That shit was junk and caused no end of issues for gamers. Some Games for Windows Live games needed files tweaking so the player could bypass the “signing in” process that would often crash games, if these games were apps then we couldn’t tweak anything and we’d have to rely on Microsoft to fix the process. With very little information being released from Microsoft regarding their intentions and ability to work with consumers on the points raised in the blog post I feel very ambivalent about UWA vs. Win32 for games.
Microsoft has stated that more information will be released regarding their plans for UMP at their Build Developer Conference at the end of March, so we will have to wait a couple of weeks until any more news reaches us here at DGS. Be sure to check back to get the latest from Microsoft.
Written by: Robert “theOzman” Oswald
Dedicated Gamers shack 