Well, it must be that time of the year again where Microsoft dusts off the Phil Spencer bot to talk about how totally involved Microsoft wants to be in the PC Gaming market. Or sorry… I mean how totally involved Microsoft wants everyone to move to Windows 10 to partake in GFWL 2.0
PC Gamer held an interview with ol Phil, the guy known for telling people about their focus on engaging PC Gamers since 2014 and not really doing much about it… UNTIL NOW!
I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming.
Oops, he misspoke. Let me correct that:
I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming… By trying to make Windows 10 and our App Store relevant.
Fixed for accuracy.
There are games I was talking about earlier, like Ashes of the Singularity, a fast-paced RTS game—probably not the best controller game, and I want to make sure those games are great.
Don’t worry Phil. I hear Ashes of the Singularity runs great with the Steam Controller, even if you have a nonsteam version! You just need the exe and…. oh right.
What I want to make sure is that gamers on our platforms, you feel like you have access to as many games as you can, and as a developer you feel like you have the tools and service to reach as many gamers as you can.
As usual Microsoft continues to be unfashionably late to the party. Steam kinda beat you to that… years ago. They even tried to get you guys on board and you pretty much laughed at them and went off doing your own thing. Hell, GOG’s store is becoming great enough to compete with Steam. Meaning even they can go to town bitchslapping your sorry excuse for a store.
I think there are a real two factors that today differentiate what I consider PC and console gaming. One is input. We’ve said we’re going to support keyboard and mouse on console, and clearly you can plug a controller into a PC, so that’s not a trump card, but PC games have to—PC games can support keyboard and mouse, console games today usually don’t and for the most part can’t. The other thing is the play space itself. I’m usually closer to my monitor, it’s a smaller screen. All these are ‘usually’s. And my TV experience on a console, I’m further away, it’s more of a communal play experience. If I take my PC and I HDMI it into my television, and I use my wireless dongle to play with controllers, is it now a console or a PC?
I gotta hand it to him. He really has a way of stating the obvious. He sounds like he could just empty his bowels in amazement if he also found out you could store more than 1 TB of games on the average PC Master Race gamers system.
I think you could kind of get into scenarios where the hardware specs kind of overlap, probably at the fundamental level, or the hardware capabilities overlap enough where the differentiation kind of blurs. But the console experience is a dedicated gaming hardware device that is very appliance-like, instant on, ability to basically do one thing, which is play games, very well.
Really? Fascinating. Lots of people have instant on gaming systems these days too thanks to SSD’s. They make great boot drives, and you can even have more than one mechanical hard drive for storage. Mindblowing amirite?
PC is a multi-purpose device. I love that people play games on their PC. You see a ton of people playing games, even on Windows 10 already.
Good job! Gotta shoehorn Windows 10 in there! After all you guys have been doing a bang up job trying to shoehorn it into peoples Windows 7/8 updates.
But it also can do Outlook and load Photoshop and browse the web. So there are some fundamental differences about the hardware between the two that I think will always mean there are differences between console and PC gaming, and I want to embrace those differences, not try to get rid of them.
Thanks for clarifying. I was worried you were going to take away the ability to use Photoshop and the internet etc etc etc. I cried for weeks mourning the possible loss and much like a shining beacon of wisdom you confirmed that you are going to let us do computer things on our computers. Thank you Microsoft, thank you…
We talked about Halo Wars, we’ve talked about things that… it’s not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna wait and see.’ We’re in, right. We are in, and we want to make sure that PC gamers are able to play PC games that we can go build. I love investing more in PC games. It would be nice to invest in some very tried-and-true PC genres when we think about that, of, ‘hey, let’s go and build some great PC games as part of our portfolio.’ But no, the Quantum Break thing is definitely not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna try this out and see how it does.’ From the top of the company on down, we’re committed to making sure gaming is great on Windows, and we think first-party content has a role to play there.
Gaming was great on Windows. Anyone remember how often Microsoft released new versions of Direct X? From 1995 to 2003 we went from Direct X 1.0 to Direct X 9.0b. Then they kept using 9.0c for from 2004 to 2008 because gamers had better performance on 9c than 10 under Vista, which was maintained between 2006 to 2009. Then from 2009 to 2013 they developed Direct X 11. Then in 2015 they announced Direct X 12 because they needed something new to move people to a shitty operating system so that people could forget about Windows 8. Yeah, PC Gaming is important to Microsoft these days. We went from having a new version practically every year to having to run on the same API’s for over a decade. I feel your love Microsoft…
Phil: Yeah, well, we obviously have the same list, and maybe even a little longer than what the community has brought up around Rise of the Tomb Raider. Certain things will happen very quickly in terms of, like, mGPU support and stuff where there’s no policy, it’s just us working through the timeline of implementation. VSync lock, kind of the same thing. There’s specific reasons that it’s there, but it’s not something that’s kind of a religion on our side that this has to work. Modding, we’re focused on modding even on console with, like, Fallout. We obviously own Minecraft, we understand the importance of modding, and making sure that we support that in the PC ecosystem is critical to UWA success. Our goal is to make UWP [Universal Windows Platform] the best platform for game developers and gamers to support, but we know we’ve got room to grow.
Things would go better for Microsoft if they didn’t try to shove people into their own little world. Heck, even PlayStation is finally jumping on the Streaming bandwagon. Soon people will be able to stream their PlayStation games onto Windows and even Mac (No love for Linux though), and with Steam we already have the option of streaming from one system to another regardless of OS. Meanwhile you have to own Windows 10 if you want to stream your games from the XBone.
They are not Pro PC Gamer, they’re pro PC Gamer for Windows 10… and the fact that they’re using games like Gears Of War to lure people over to their new OS is absurd. They pulled this shit with Halo back in the Vista days and it failed miserably. Microsoft never learns.
