
Epic Games founder says Microsoft's patches will make Steam progressively worse - carlosrg
http://www.pcgamer.com/tim-sweeney-thinks-microsoft-will-make-steam-progressively-worse-with-windows-10-patches/
======
pjc50
This is something that has long been feared. It's also rather like the Y2K
problem in that as long as people make a noise about it, it can be prevented -
but preventing it leaves all the complainers looking alarmist.

It's also why Valve have invested in the Steam Machine. At the moment it's not
a serious competitive prospect, but it's there ready as an escape valve.

After all, only one company can get a 10-30% cut of games sold to run on
Windows, and Microsoft don't see why it shouldn't be them.

Microsoft do phase things out, but only slowly, with long migration times for
business users.

~~~
jasonkostempski
A Steam Machine is just as bad as a Microsoft Machine.

~~~
ferrari8608
Bad in what way(s) in particular?

~~~
jasonkostempski
Steam is just as bad as the Microsoft store is what it boils down too.
Centralized control over games you've paid for. It doesn't matter who it is,
it's not good.

------
vinnyp
Former Softie, worked in Windows for 9 years from Vista to Win8, mostly on the
Shell and UI platform teams. For Vista and half of Win7 development, I was the
PM owner for our UI platform (comctl32, DirectUI, Visual Styling, and High
DPI). This is my opinion, I don't speak for the company -

During my time there, I did not see any anti-competitive practices the author
is speaking of. Those days are long gone. I know first hand we were committed
to compatibility and growth of the platform, new and old. That being said,
it's clear that building on Win32 is painful and not cheap. Win32 is great if
you want direct system access and complete control over _everything,_ up and
down the stack. This works well for large enterprise applications and games.
The tradeoff here is that you must roll your own everything and work hard not
to do stupid shit.

During the Vista days, we saw that the Windows app ecosystem was struggling
because we didn't have a good platform story. You had to choose between Win32
and .NET. If you're a native developer, it was Win32. Win32 didn't provide a
great app and UI framework (have you ever tried to owner draw a control or do
fluid layout?). This is why many app developers during that time built their
own app and UI framework, used MFC or leveraged a 3rd party framework. I was
only familiar with the app platform so I can't speak to the options for
building a game. I'm sure it was limited as well.

Microsoft introduced many platforms since Vista - WPF, Silverlight, XNA, Win8
Apps (Windows XAML and WinJS), and UWP. I'm sure there are more :) Even with
all of those new platforms in the mix, Win32 is still alive and well.

I believe UWP is a huge win for developers. You don't need to roll your own
_everything._ For the companies that want complete control, Win32 is still
there. It is true that certain things are only available to UWP developers.
There is no malicious intent, it's really only about priorities. The new thing
comes first. The developer community needs to speak up if they want something.
Microsoft will listen.

~~~
Mithaldu
While i don't believe a word Sweeney says until he sources his claims, your
post has a few self delusions as well.

> Microsoft introduced many platforms since Vista - WPF, Silverlight, XNA,
> Win8 Apps (Windows XAML and WinJS), and UWP. I'm sure there are more :) Even
> with all of those new platforms in the mix, Win32 is still alive and well.

Not "Even with". More like "thanks to this chaos and the uselessness of those
platforms".

> I believe UWP is a huge win for developers.

Without specifying which developers, that is meaningless. Last i heard a game
dev can't even control vsync.

> The developer community needs to speak up if they want something. Microsoft
> will listen.

This is the worst part. Speak up WHERE? Speak up HOW?

"Listening" is not "reacting when a blogpost gets reposted everywhere".
Listening is taking the time and place out of your day to make sure that the
person has your undivided attention.

------
cwyers
This is nonsense on stilts. There aren't UWP versions of half of Office, and
the ones with UWP versions aren't as full-featured as the Win32 versions.
There's no UWP version of Visual Studio. Look at the revenue from those two
things, look at Microsoft's gaming revenue, look at Valve's revenue... what is
the evidence that Microsoft is willing to sabotage their Windows, Office and
Visual Studio product lines all to get a rounding error's worth of additional
profit?

~~~
gant
It's a very long term thing. It'll probably happen because new APIs will be on
UWP and not on Win32. I think VR might be the "next thing" that'll only get
in-OS support in UWP.

~~~
RubyPinch
Windows' thing has always been backwards compatibility (not counting programs
with questionable code in the first place), and the entire OS is win32 as
well.

They'd practically be telling all their casual, professional, and enterprise
userbase to not update. Their prior support for win32 has locked them into it,
even if they want to leave it

~~~
criddell
> Windows' thing has always been backwards compatibility

I think they are realizing that it's holding them back and I suspect they will
be less afraid of breaking things in the name of progress.

When I updated my laptop from Windows 7 to Windows 10, it just uninstalled the
things it thought was incompatible (a Cisco VPN client was the big problem).

In fact, the sneaky and slimy strategy that they used to get people to update
to Windows 10 feels almost like contempt for customers that don't want the
things Microsoft is pushing.

Is the PC gaming market a big one? Is there an opportunity here for Linux to
become a gaming contender?

~~~
Sylos
There certainly is an opportunity, it's just still very questionable how
things will play out.

Current state is that 25% of the Steam library is Linux-compatible. That's
about 2500 games, so definitely enough to keep you entertained, unless you're
the type of gamer who always has to play the newest AAA titles.

With Vulkan slowly picking up adoption, this will probably increase even more
rapidly in the future, too.

Next thing is that Vulkan as well as DX12 make it so that drivers for graphics
cards will be much smaller and therefore the resulting drivers will be much
less likely to be broken, which has been a big problem on Linux in the past.

But Nvidia has now pretty good Linux drivers anyways and AMD has recently
started investing more resources into it. Among other things, AMD open-sourced
their drivers, so now the Linux-community can help to fix up their drivers
instead of maintaining an own driver.

I also figure that the growing machine learning market gives a good incentive
for Nvidia and AMD to have good support for Linux, so that should translate
back to the desktop, too.

The only problem is that all of this can serve as reason to not avoid Linux,
but unless Microsoft really does continue making such great arguments against
using Windows, we won't really see many people change operating system...

~~~
criddell
> 25% of the Steam library is Linux-compatible

When a title is Linux-compatible, does that mean it works flawlessly? Does it
use Wine?

~~~
Sylos
It means that the developers marked it as Linux-compatible on Steam.

I don't know, if Valve requires anything for that, but it's specifically _not_
the percentage of titles which you can get to work through any combination of
black magic. It's the percentage of titles where the developers offer you
support, if it doesn't work on your system.

And I know that some of those games do use WINE internally for the port, but
it's properly pre-configured in a wrapper and should work just as well as a
native Linux-game. So, you don't need WINE installed separately on your system
for those.

------
dogma1138
Oddly enough Steam isn't that great for developers either. It takes a huge
cut, it takes cut of all microtransactions, it bullies developers into price
fixing and sales, and it abuses it's de facto monopoly to ransom developers
that want to publish on Steam.

For consumers it ain't that great either, the curation process on steam is non
existent, it does not force developers to maintain compatibility, the search
option is very bad and you can not filter games based on release year (you can
only see the year they released on steam and I've seen people buying 15 year
old games by mistake). Steam ties you into their DRM (you can also use a 3rd
party DRM if you want) and their API's.

Saying that Steam is somehow the champion of open gaming on Windows is silly,
it's a monolithic monopoly that does pretty much my way or the highway moves
all the time. So far I haven't seen any evidence that MSFT has any interest in
killing Win32, but maybe it should, if UWP can become a better platform at the
end I don't see any reason to stick to Win32 when developing applications. All
our mobile platforms have a single store, Apple has it's own store, based on
the few UWP games that have been pirated you can install UWP applications
without using the store, MSFT can in the end support 3rd party distributors.
And if it doesn't well TBH considering that Steam hasn't been a champion for
consumers for a long time, I don't really see it as being a "bad" thing, and
if Microsoft makes them worry maybe they'll get their shit together again.

~~~
whamlastxmas
How does it ransom developers? That's a bold claim.

------
Sacho
Sweeney provides this as Microsoft's alleged strategy to get rid of Steam:

"Slowly, over the next five years, they will force-patch Windows 10 to make
Steam progressively worse and more broken. They’ll never completely break it,
but will continue to break it until, in five years, people are so fed up that
Steam is buggy that the Windows Store seems like an ideal alternative. That’s
exactly what they did to their previous competitors in other areas. Now
they’re doing it to Steam. It’s only just starting to become visible.
Microsoft might not be competent enough to succeed with their plan, but
they’re certainly trying."

What previous competitors is he talking about?

~~~
0xcde4c3db
There used to be a saying "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" (although
that's now largely regarded as apocryphal/inaccurate), and the memos around
the "AARD code" [1] are fairly damning.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code)

~~~
13of40
That happened 25 years ago, and even the guy who wrote the code has been dead
for eight. I don't think it's a solid data point for predicting what Microsoft
is going to do tomorrow.

------
staticelf
I don't really understand why it bothers game makers? Either it's Steam that
takes a 30% cut or it's Microsoft?

Sure you can sell your games standalone and I doubt that will never change but
most games benefit on being on a platform like Steam or Microsoft Store. For
me as a consumer, I like that there is competition.

~~~
carlosrg
The thing is that if one day Microsoft decides to phase out the Win32 platform
and leave only UWP, right now the _only_ official way to get UWP apps is
through the Microsoft's Windows Store. So the competition you're talking about
would disappear because there would be only one way to get Windows software,
the Microsoft way. It would be impossible to have competing App Stores,
similar to the situation right now on iOS.

Seems far-fetched but I can see Microsoft slowly deprecating Win32. It would
be similar to when Apple deprecated Carbon, only slower: they'll stop adding
new features, they'll tell developers to avoid it for any new development,
etc. Won't happen overnight though as they're too much legacy software out
there, but it could happen in the span of several years, a decade or so. Right
now what I'm saying is fiction but it's a possibility any store developer like
Valve and customers too should have in mind.

~~~
ewzimm
If Microsoft ever deprecates Win32, they won't sneak it overnight. Anyone can
integrate UWP into their store today if they want, and they would have plenty
of time to do it. This is a company that still supports Windows XP from 2001
with special contracts. It seems strange to compare this theoretical point in
the future where Win32 is deprecated with who supports it right now. It's a
good point that it's important to have platforms that no one company controls,
but this fear of UWP seems unjustified when it's open to anyone.

~~~
squeaky-clean
We're comparing it to this theoretical point in the future because that's
literally what the article says.

> "The risk here is that, if Microsoft convinces everybody to use UWP, then
> they phase out Win32 apps. If they can succeed in doing that then it’s a
> small leap to forcing all apps and games to be distributed through the
> Windows Store. Once we reach that point, the PC has become a closed
> platform. It won’t be that one day they flip a switch that will break your
> Steam library – what they’re trying to do is a series of sneaky manoeuvres.
> They make it more and more inconvenient to use the old apps, and,
> simultaneously, they try to become the only source for the new ones."

~~~
ewzimm
What I'm responding to is "if one day Microsoft decides to phase out... right
now the only official way..." If they ever decide to phase it out, it won't
matter what support UWP had mid-2016, it will matter what support it has when
the phase out happens. Also, it's officially sanctioned right now to sideload
downloaded programs not installed from the Microsoft store. Microsoft has
publicly promised never to close the platform, and they aren't so powerful
that they can afford to go against their development community like that.
There's nothing at all indicating that Microsoft is going to shut out
competing app stores and sideloading. The only evidence is that some people
feel that Microsoft wants to do that.

------
crummy
There are so many "what ifs" to get to his feared state. It's hard for me to
imagine Microsoft phasing out win32 (especially after the disastrous results
on WinRT).

~~~
pjc50
While Win32 is hard to phase out, DirectX is more flexible and crucially not
critical to business users of Windows. There was already a mini-version of
this fiasco when DX11 launched for 7 but not Vista. Microsoft could quite
easily say that e.g. DX16 would require UWP, distribution through the Windows
store, telemetry, ad insertion, whatever.

(Let's not also forget the disaster that was Games For Windows Live)

~~~
animal531
Agreed, and it's still here; you can only get DX12 with Win10.

That hasn't kicked up as many waves yet because the tech has been slow to
adopt.

~~~
douche
Also because DX11 is still perfectly serviceable for most applications - and
DX12 is considerably more complicated.

There are still new games being developed on top of DX9 today.

~~~
Silhouette
In any case, surely no game developer is going to make DX12 a hard requirement
to run their PC games any time soon.

Even today, Steam's hardware and software survey puts DX12-capable hardware at
around 70% of their users but nearly half of those aren't running on Win10.
That's after a year of Microsoft literally giving it away and it being the
default OS you get preinstalled on most new PCs in stores. The pattern of
adoption hasn't been entirely surprising either: a fairly rapid shift over the
first six months or so after 10 came out, but then a much slower shift since
then.

It's going to be a long time before anyone running a modern GPU on Windows 7
can't run the latest PC games with decent results.

------
wavefunction
Steam and games are the only reason I'm going to build a brand new VR capable
Windows rig. Without that I don't really need Windows in my life.

------
rnernento
I'm confused, can't Steam just release as a free Universal App?

Also, with Steam's push towards Linux support this would be a dangerous
strategy for Microsoft. Gaming is what drives a lot of people to Windows over
other platforms. If Microsoft actively makes Steam unusable on Windows there's
no reason to think people won't just seek out a better platform for Steam.

~~~
cmiles74
I don't think MS will allow a Univeral App that installs other Universal Apps.
Just like Apple, they'll have a list of restrictions on what these apps can
do. After all, a sandbox app that can arbitrarily install any other app is not
very sandboxy.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
There's nothing wrong with allowing one app to install another, but the key
is, if you can't leave the sandbox, you request the OS do it for you. Android
apps are sandboxed, and can install other apps, but you get an OS interstitial
asking if you want to do it.

Similarly, a UWP app could conceivably be allowed to trigger the install of
another UWP app, but it would pop-up a Windows box, not unlike a UAC elevation
prompt, showing the app name, publisher if properly signed, and requesting the
user permission to go forward with the install.

~~~
cmiles74
You make a good point, in the Android world you can manually install the
Amazon Underground application and grant it the ability to install it's own
apps. I don't believe there's a similar side-loading method on iOS, however:
Apple has take steps to prevent this.

IMHO, I expect Microsoft to release a solution more like Apple's App Store and
less like Google. Clearly, Epic Games' founder has the same concerns. He's
also expressed concern with Microsoft only allowing something like Steam to be
installed via side-loading, which he thinks provides a barrier to entry that
is too high. I tend to agree, it's easy to slowly make side-loading more and
more difficult as time goes on, or to make more and more critical APIs
unavailable to non-UWP applications.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Steam is only available via sideloading now. You have to go to a website and
download the installer and run it manually. This is how Windows has always
worked. UWP will allow the same, but is simply a more secure application
format which can't easily contain malware. The only difference is Microsoft
now also offers an app store.

------
ocdtrekkie
Note that at the last Build conference, Microsoft made a specific point to
demonstrate a UWP app with SteamWorks compatibility on stage. But, you know,
clearly they're actively using UWP to kill Steam.

[http://www.develop-online.net/news/universal-windows-
platfor...](http://www.develop-online.net/news/universal-windows-platform-
adds-support-for-mods-and-steamworks/0218598)

I'm rate-limited, so to respond to the person who commented here:

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish": You might notice if you read the linked
Wikipedia article, this is from 1995. Also known as 20 years ago, when almost
everyone involved has since retired. Or died. I was in elementary school when
this strategy was used by Microsoft. The person who said the phrase in a
meeting, Paul Maritz, left Microsoft 16 years ago. Babies born during that
meeting are legal adults today.

~~~
ctrl-j
Microsoft has been known to use Embrace-Extend-Extinguish as a strategy. So
this means _nothing_.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish)

~~~
pluma
The most recent examples on that page are nearly ten years old. I was a
"Micro$oft" hater in school, too, but I don't see any other indication that
they're relapsing apart from the accusations made in this news article --
certainly not any more than Google or Apple.

------
brudgers
_over the next five years, they will force-patch Windows 10 to make Steam
progressively worse and more broken._

Linkedin lists Valve as having between 200 and 500 employees. Putting a team
of engineers to work on removing the dependency on Windows32 seems like a
reasonable alternative to a course of inaction dedicated to letting Steam full
into suck.

My intuition is that Microsoft is even likely to work with a partial potential
competitor like Valve when it comes to something like this because anyone who
is using Steam on Windows...well they're using Windows and Microsoft has an
substantial interest in not having Windows suck for the people who use it.

To me, this kinda' sounds like Valve announcing that it's not really going to
spend any more money on evolving the Steam code base.

~~~
robotresearcher
The non-Win32 apps are signed and distributed by MS through their own store.
All apps delivered that way pay a toll to MAS. That's what Steam wishes to
avoid, since they collect the toll right now.

~~~
brudgers
Universal apps can be sideloaded. [1] There may be a market for a service that
skins the process in an end user friendly way. That market is probably larger
than just games. An analog might be Github over Git.

Whether Valve should invest in developing technologies to keep Steam relevant
is a business decision. This appears to be announcement of Valve's intent. I
would not be surprised if paying off the technical debt incurred by Steam does
not meet the investment model of Valve's controlling interests. The Windows
ecosystem is littered with technically obsolescent cash-cows: e.g. Laplink.

[1]:[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/uwp/packaging/packa...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/uwp/packaging/packaging-uwp-apps#sideload-your-app-package)

~~~
Sylos
Is sideloading of apps unrevocable?

~~~
brudgers
Because Microsoft is primarily a B2B company and makes a lot of enterprise
sales, I suspect that from a practical perspective removing it would require
an impractically radical shift in its business model and sales channels.

Before Bring Your Own Device, there was bring your work home. Windows is to a
meaningful degree a business class product sold to consumers. Removing
sideloading from normal Windows would make Windows less attractive as a
standard platform for enterprise if people cannot use line of business apps on
any old device.

Of course, that doesn't make it irrevocable. But revocation seems unlikely to
me.

------
UnoriginalGuy
This is completely unfounded and tinfoil hat levels of conspiracy.

If they stripped Win32 out of Windows, it wouldn't only impact Steam, but
Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, Photoshop Suite, Chrome/Firefox, iTunes,
their shiny new Linux tools, etc would also be out.

This goes against the ethos of Microsoft. Criticise them all you wish, but
they're absolutely obsessed with backwards compatibility and always have been.
They know the ONLY reason Windows is popular is because you can throw in a
piece of software you purchased in 1999 and it will "likely" still work. If
they dropped Win32 entirely, then Windows is interchangeable with a
Chromebook.

Heck up until 64x one of their test cases was if Doom (released in 1993) still
ran. They only stopped because 64x doesn't support 16 bit.

~~~
pjmlp
"Project Centennial: Bringing Existing Desktop Applications to the Universal
Windows Platform"

[https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/B829](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/B829)

~~~
RGamma
In that video they also say that sideloading can be done via double-click (no
PowerShell cmdlets or whatever necessary like in Win8; not sure how
certification/signing will play into this), and they also state that it'll be
fine to monetize an UWP app on other stores than the Windows one. If they're
actually honest with this and I haven't missed anything, UWP might well be the
best thing that's ever happened to Windows.

~~~
pjmlp
I agree.

On top of that I really like that WinRT is basically COM+ Runtime reborn and
that Visual C++ finally feels like C++ Builder for GUI RAD tooling.

And that .NET Native also got developed in the process.

------
moron4hire
> That’s exactly what they did to their previous competitors in other areas.

Are we to take this to mean that Tim Sweeney is admitting that Steam uses
undocumented Windows APIs? Because that's the only way Windows patches have
broken existing software before.

------
whack
I rarely hear complaints about the closed-platform monopolies enjoyed by the
App Store and Google Play, on their respective iOS/Android platforms. Can
someone make a case for why a similar app-store monopoly on Windows is any
worse?

~~~
majewsky
Google technically does not have an app-store monopoly on Android. A sizable
chunk of apps on my phone are from F-Droid.

Google just makes sure that most Androids have the Play Store, and then it's
just the network effect: bigger audience -> more attractive to developers ->
more apps -> more users.

~~~
theandrewbailey
> Google just makes sure that most Androids have the Play Store

I smell monopoly. They have powers to affect most of a market. Whether Google
is abusing that power (thus, illegal), I'm not sure.

------
ksk
It is hard to get through the speculation here. Does anyone have actual
evidence that this is happening? (i.e. not some memo that one person wrote to
some other person 20 years ago)

------
jackmott
Sorta like how the web gets progressively worse with each modal pop up ad.

~~~
majewsky
Not quite. You can block ads, but you can't block broken APIs. ;)

------
daxfohl
Odd to see an article complaining about MS's "closed" ecosystem after all the
work MS is doing to open source things, provide tight Linux integration, etc.

~~~
ygra
Microsoft has over 100 kiloemployees in a myriad of different business
divisions. Not all of them do things the same way. I'm not sure there is _any_
corporation of that size that act completely coherent to the outside.

------
Mithaldu
> Now they’re doing it to Steam. It’s only just starting to become visible.

{{citation}}

That is a bold fucking claim. Exactly how has this happened to Steam already?
They don't bother to provide any reference or clue.

------
perspectivep
Apparently Microsoft isn't allowed to evolve Windows with objectively better
API's.

Have fun with your GetLastError, fifteen parameter functions, and poorly
documented flags. But hey, at least it doesn't have much security, so I can
download game mods from some unknown source that have full access to
everything on my PC.

~~~
talmand
>> so I can download game mods from some unknown source that have full access
to everything on my PC

I think that's more on you than the OS.

~~~
legulere
Rule 1 of software development should be: Never blame the user, when the
situation could have been avoided through code.

Especially in this case. Isolation has been one of the main drivers of
operating systems. Isolation between users, so they can't change each other's
files etc. maliciously . Isolation between processes, so they don't
accidentally corrupt each other. At least since the first computer virus in
the wild in 1982 it should have been clear that software can also potentially
be malicious and needs to be isolated from having the same rights as the user
executing it.

The only reason why executing arbitrary x86 code in ring 3 is dangerous are
the syscall interfaces the operating systems offer.

~~~
perspectivep
Which is why UWP has a capabilities-based sandbox.

