Windows 10 has just come out to anyone who wanted to jump on the early adopting train, and reviews are mostly positive. But then again, that’s to be expected. Pretty much anything would be better than the tangled mess that was Windows 8. The Start menu is back, which is a plus, and the OS is actually usable on non-tablet platforms. Of course, there are also tons of bugs because that is always what happens with early OS releases.
But there is one set of apps that kind of annoys me in Windows 10, and for that matter Windows 8, and it’s the Xbox apps. Many of these aps are just fine. They allow you to see your Xbox friends list or check your live status or stream games from your Xbox to your PC. To be honest, most people will just ignore them.
Gamers, however, have a different problem. Microsoft is integrating its Xbox Live marketplace into Windows 10, and likely the rest of their OSes from now out. The idea is to allow people to buy everything directly from Microsoft, much the way Android has the Google Play store or Apple has the iTunes store. It’s a one stop shop.
The problem is, we already have a one stop shop. In fact we have several one stop shops, because frankly, there isn’t just one service for the PC space. Yes, most things are available on Steam, but then there’s Origin for big name EA titles which don’t get ignored, GOG for retro titles you can’t get anywhere else, and I’m sure there are some other digital distribution platforms out there that people are tinkering with.
But when you integrate a digital distribution platform as part of your OS, you are just asking for trouble. Let’s say you purchased a game from Steam, and then that game later has some sort of integration with the Windows 10 OS. Now you have a game but not the game from the windows store. Do you have the integration? Do you have to activate it via a windows store? Do you have to purchase it again on a separate platform? Will two installed copies of the game, one from each platform, end up interfering with each other? We don’t know, but these are questions we will have to ask now that Windows is trying to be a provider of software, not just an OS.
And that’s the thing. Microsoft doesn’t need to do this. They already had the PC gaming market cornered. Anyone who purchases a gaming computer is purchasing a copy of Windows. Windows doesn’t have to be a gaming platform because it already is. The primary reason people avoid PC gaming is because it’s intimidating. The threat of problems caused by improperly installed software keeps people away from experiencing all they can from their PC as a gaming platform. Introducing new ways to download games through Windows may simply increase that complexity, not decrease it.