Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney has not minced words when it has come to what he believes to be (and will be) a sneaky, underhanded strategy that Microsoft has taken with Windows 10 in locking down the PC platform. Beyond that, he believes that it's attempting to supplant Valve's Steam through subsequent required patches.
In an interview in Edge, Sweeney dissected his controversial analysis further:
The trouble started with Microsoft began shipping some PCs and regular Surfaces that were so locked down that you couldn't run Win32 apps; you could only run apps that had been bought from their story. That is a complete travesty.
Sweeney asserts that Microsoft is attempting to mask their true intentions:
They've been able to do this via some sneaky PR moves. They make a bnuch of statements that sound vaguely like they're promoting openness, but really they're not promising anything of the sort.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
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 Steam.
While Microsoft may not have the power it things it has to take over Steam, they could be trying to undermine the Steam platform, though as a competitor in the same space when it comes to game distribution, that might be considered fair game. Microsoft has the potential to force game developers to follow along by locking the next DX to UWP, limiting choices by restricting software, and many would have to fall in line due to the power of the Windows ecosystem.
Do you believe Windows is attempting to shut down Steam or is Sweeney's theory overreaching?
