Salakhetdinov Shamil
mcp2004 at mail.ru
Tue Jul 31 04:40:11 CDT 2012
Hi Hans -- Thank you for your detailed reply: I'd still hope that are mainly fears... Yes, games development for Windows 8 Runtime/tablets will require to learn new technologies: The future of game development on Microsoft platforms http://www.billreiss.com/the-future-of-game-development-on-microsoft-platforms/ and Windows 8 RT/tablet Windows Market promise to be "MS owned and driven" but you'd still be able to continue distributing Windows 8 desktop games as you did before for WinxP, Vista, Win7 - so an option to develop games for WinRT platform is a new option, which can only help to expand your business? (after all with a proper game's UI interface abstraction layer it shouldn't be that a big technical challenge to implement Win8 RT UI?) For "mere mortals" application developers WinRT development wouldn't require to have that much new development concepts to master(?) provided you have a good working experience with .NET, WPF and Silverlight... How does the new Windows 8 Runtime (WinRT) compare to Silverlight and WPF? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7416826/how-does-the-new-windows-8-runtime-winrt-compare-to-silverlight-and-wpf?lq=1 And Windows 8 desktop mode development will remain the same... We will see - ( I have here all the three main competitors to compare: Andorid tablet and two Android phones of my son, Android (power HTC) phone and iPad of my sister, my own Windows Phone 7.5 with Metro style interface: I have noted already the latter one seems to be more modern and innovative, I hope I'm not subjective in this my current "technology perception", I can be wrong. We will see... Thank you. -- Shamil Mon, 30 Jul 2012 19:54:53 -0700 от Hans-Christian Andersen <hans.andersen at phulse.com>: Hi Shamil, No. I don't think that is what they were saying, but I agree that the article was a bit thin on the details. The problem for Steam and Blizzard are a mix of issues with what we know Windows 8 will deliver and also what they fear Microsoft will do in the future. While Windows 8 on Intel will not restrict users from accessing the desktop and installing their own applications, Windows 8 running on ARM will most certainly be restricted to the point that Valves' Steam business simply cannot exist on that platform. It will be the case that games can only be sold through the Windows store. This also creates the impression on companies like Valve and Blizzard that there might very well be a possibility that Microsoft will continue this trend and eventually be tempted to completely lock down Windows in future releases (or updates?). After all, Microsoft appears very keen to follow Apples model for many things and often to an extreme degree. After all, Microsoft is a public company with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. Steam could very simply be seen as a middle man that doesn't need to be there and Microsoft has all the power to kill them off (which isn't something unusual for Microsoft - "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run", right?). Which brings us to another reason, which is related to the previous one - an issue of principle, which is that PCs and Windows has always been seen as an open platform. That Microsoft produces an operating system on an open platform, which it is a fair playing field for anyone to produce software and no single entity has preferential treatment (remember when Microsoft got in trouble for making use of secret undocumented APIs for their own applications?). With Windows 8, Microsoft is effectively breaking this perception, which is why companies like Valve and such are now taking a closer look at Linux. And it is possible they are doing this merely as a public threat to Microsoft, but the issue is a real concern for many companies. Also, my understand is that Gabe Newell is not a big fan of the UI changes in Windows 8 - ie. Metro and etc, but I'm pretty sure the effect to his business model is much more important to him. Hans * <<<tail text trimmed >>>