Carmack: Nothing exciting about Windows 8
Microsoft may be excited about Windows 8, but id's John Carmack says he is there is nothing he is looking forward to in the new operating system.
First, Valve boss Gabe Newell went on the record as saying Windows 8 is a bit of a catastrophe. Now, id Software's John Carmack says there is nothing he is looking forward to in the new operating system and that he is quite content with Windows 7.
Speaking at QuakeCon 2012, Carmack told the audience during his keynote that there is nothing exciting about Windows 8. "Windows XP did everything we needed for quite awhile," he said, "Hardly anyone at id used Vista." When Windows 7 came out, Carmack added, it was a bit more attractive because it did some things better and faster, so there is no reason for him to consider switching to Windows 8.
Well, there may be one reason. He joked that with Doom 3 BFG coming out for PC soon, he probably should do some testing with it.
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Shacknews
replyJohn Keefer posted a new article, Carmack: Nothing exciting about Windows 8.
Microsoft may be excited about Windows 8, but id's John Carmack says he is there is nothing he is looking forward to in the new operating system.-
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Except he switched to Windows 7, citing that it did things better and faster.
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"When Windows 7 came out, Carmack added, it was a bit more attractive because it did some things better and faster"
Carmack is basically a robot in a meat suit. Speed in his renderers is all Carmack really cares about. Since win8 doesn't seem to offer much/any(?) speed increase he's not interested. That's all he's saying. He's not saying win8 is going to be a catastrophe, a la Gabe Newell.-
I'm with Carmack on this, W8 is nothing interesting just a backwards step in the UI for any power user and the only improvements I would genuinely be interested in are optimisation, less bloat and more efficient Kernel pipeline none of which W8 brings to the table.
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Now this is more interesting http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows
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none of which Win8 bring to the table? How does it run so well on (relatively) low powered tablets?
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Why would I care about tablets? I'm a desktop user and I'm only interested in high end rendering. As a Desktop user W8 is of little use to me and made no improvement in the areas I view as important. Obviously Carmack feels the same way.
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I assumed you'd think about the implications of the fact.
the only improvements I would genuinely be interested in are optimisation, less bloat and more efficient Kernel pipeline
again, how do you think Win8 is managing to run so well on tablets if it hasn't improved the general level of performance from Win7? You can find plenty of specific details on performance improvements for fancy desktops
since that's what you care about:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/07/23/hardware-accelerating-everything-windows-8-graphics.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/03/21/scaling-to-different-screens.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/07/reducing-runtime-memory-in-windows-8.aspx
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how can you possibly believe this? Are businesses investing billions of dollars to upgrade their systems just because it's shiny and new and not because of wide ranging improvements to features they care about? Has OS security not improved massively since Windows XP (when you couldn't even safely connect a fresh install to the internet sans AV software)? Has the stability of the OS not improved markedly so you don't have to worry about drivers causing BSODs and don't have to reinstall frequently to 'clean up' the machine? Do you think the massive improvements in battery life in laptops from 2001 to 2012 is purely because of hardware improvements? Etc, etc.
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You've just proved my point...
Most business aren't upgrading to W7. There aren't enough new features to justify the cost.
The security is also a minor thing, and was always user error in the first place. The pop-ups everytime you want to launch an exe are more of an annoyance and not anything major. Browsers themselves do a good job of detecting scam sites and block you from visiting.
You had to reinstall frequently? Again, user error. More stable? Maybe, but an entire new operating system just for that?
W7 is a minor upgrade.-
I should've just lol'd your original reply and moved on apparently
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Call me when id does something exciting again.
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No, I'm just saying that his pronouncement doesn't carry much weight with me.
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His VR stuff is pretty exciting. Valve seems to agree.
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I've been wanting decent VR for decades. However, no matter how cool it's going to be a niche market for the foreseeable future. Look how long it took for HDTV to actually become common place and there is even less reason for the average household to have a set of VR glasses. At most it will be supported by a few games and bought by a few people with a decent amount of disposable income no matter how "exciting".
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Oculus Rift
http://oculusvr.com
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You know I am really getting pissed of with these shops saying "eh what ever", even if they have half assed the evaluation of WIndows 8 and don't care for the new features how can they NOT mention they are excited about DX11.1 as game developers --> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh404562(v=vs.85).aspx ? I would really love to know what all of these big shops want to see in the next OS? Seriously?
[sigh] :( maybe these larger companies have lost the fire inside as being a gamer, remembering how things where before we have progressed so fast all the time or just straight up no longer appreciate the little things that keep progressing tech forward. I mean there is actually quiet a lot of new feature under the hood in WIn8 besides the Metro interface.
Maybe in this day and age we take for granted way to many things and unless something increase by like 200% and blows us away we just don't care any more.
All well I appreciate the little and medium things still and I am sure there are others. Flat out windows 8 is not just the same OS as WIn7 with Metro if you read up what has been changed and try it.
To me just having the new DX11.1 will own and is massive on its own for instance, that's just one thing.-
I think the main concern people have with Win 8 is the potential for it to evolve into a fully-locked down platform where the only way to install apps is via the app store. That's possibly a stupid conclusion to make, but one being made nonetheless.
From the technical side, a lot of game developers are still using lower versions of DirectX for their work, one I worked for was still using v9 until recently. Why? Because it provided APIs for everything they needed to do. They didn't (yet) need any of the higher versions of DirectX.
There are some pretty neat features in DirectX 11.x, but I'd be interested to know just how many game developers are actually making use of that feature-set. My general impression is it's not that many. Either through the features being currently niche-market, or the level of time needed to implement effects and procedural calls that aren't even going to be seen by the majority of the current graphics card market end-users.
Valcan_S we're playing a constant catch-up game, it does suck to see people simply "meh" latest releases, but when they have tools that do the job, and there's nothing that grabs them and says, "yes! this is what is going to be a radical game-changing feature", maybe that's understandable. For now atleast, I think the days of having blinding performance and feature changes between graphics API's are over. Just as we went from cpu frequency to number of cores in the processor market, that same rule is in some way pushing into the GPU market. Developers are looking more at what they can get from the existing API's and hardware, rather than looking at what's newer and faster.
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All the armchair IT professionals on the internet like to dismiss the danger of a walled garden future for windows but Microsoft has given more than enough indication that that is where they want to go.
Am I the only who remembers the new Visual Studio would be for Metro development only? They backpedaled fast but the writing IS on the wall.
But ok sure we at the shack like Microsoft nowadays so everyone with a contrary opinion is automatically wrong. Carmack, Gabe Newell? What the fuck do they know, right?-
I think you're missing the point of my post. I'm not dismissing anything. I've only stated that the technical reasons for being excited about the latest version of a now levelling-out OS and graphics API are diminishing.
(For the record I don't own an armchair)-
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It's stupid if you don't look at the larger picture. Yes it's possible. Will it happen? Doubtful. Either way none of us know if the big bad monster in the room that no one's willing to talk about, - your walled garden, is worthy of being feared to the degree that it is. Customers are fickle. Vendor lockout is a sure-fire way to piss a lot of people off, very quickly.
My opinion? Windows App Store is a great thing, as long as it's not the only way in which to download and install apps going forwards to Windows vNext. Locking it down so it's the only option? Stupid.
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Am I the only who remembers the new Visual Studio would be for Metro development only? They backpedaled fast but the writing IS on the wall.
That was never the case. It was only a question of what free versions would be able to do.-
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So is the fear that MS are going to gradually lock down windows in the style of sticking a lobster in a pan of water and slowly raising the heat?
If that's the case, I guess the only way we'll know if that's the plan they have is by looking at Win 9. I can only imagine a metric ton of anti-competitive legal cases being brought by governments, given Windows' ubiquity as the defacto OS for most of the worlds population. -
more than enough for what? To justify the hat you're wearing? What conclusions were you drawing about the future when there were no free versions of VS at all?
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More than enough to see the direction Microsoft would like to see. Doesn't mean it's going to happen but if it is you can't sit back and wait which is why Gabe Newell is doing what he's doing. If Microsoft does NOT want to go down this route then there is plenty they could do to prove it. Instead they are letting the fears live and making people prepare to jump ship if it turns out to be necessary, which hurts MS's position no matter what they do because Valve won't be taking Steam Linux offline when it's out there.
And I'm not going to argue this shit with you any further because I know it is impossible to get anywhere.-
If Microsoft does NOT want to go down this route then there is plenty they could do to prove it
Like what? Your fear is based on conjecture about multiple future releases. So what could MS do to alleviate those fears right now other than publicly releasing the plans for Windows for like the next 2-3 versions (which don't exist)? Anything less than that and you could make the same argument you're doing now.-
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Everything that is wrong with Android being open can be fixed, and hell Microsoft is probably the most qualified to pull it off.
How? Android is using the MS model from Windows and early Windows Mobile, so clearly MS understands well the problems with those models and has had many many years to try to improve on some of those issues. Why isn't Google qualified/capable of fixing the same problems in Android?-
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The problems Windows, WM6, and Android face/have faced regarding fragmentation, upgrading, piracy, etc really have little to do with just 'making an OS' which is what you don't get. Those problems don't exist for Android because Google isn't smart enough to somehow magically make them disappear in the Android code. It's a business model problem. What you're saying is basically "just solve the simple and obvious issues of horizontal business models and OEM partnerships man, duh". Except for the part where that's enormously difficult and so far largely unsolved as far as the problems mentioned above.
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And whether the icons would have color. http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2623017-add-some-color-to-visual-studio-11-beta#comments
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And? User feedback was acted on and changes were made. Don't you usually complain how user feedback is being ignored?
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Developers are more important to satisfy than power users.
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Your ability to link unrelated cases knows no bounds. Yes, user feedback is prioritized. Different teams will prioritize different feedback differently based on different goals, different schedules, different costs and more. That one particular piece of feedback was acted on while another was not says nothing in isolation about its overall importance. The cost of the thing that was changed may have been massively simpler or safer than the one which was not for example.
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Yeah well I guess on a positive note all AAA companies complaining will help assure MS never does make a fully-locked down platform so I guess I should not be so pissed off and actually thank them. Its just so many times people shit on MS and their OS yet to me its the best thing out there and I really think they are doing a great job all these years. I guess they get tough love and their success is their own enemy.
Totally DX9 really has everything you need to a point(you can not make UE4 type engine with it) and minus the volumetric stuff from just a visual stand point. Normal,displacement and parallax mapping is a pure mans tessellation but all can look really awesome. Still the new APIs do add allot of other cool and more efficient stuff I guess when UE4 drops and some others it may spark other devs to finally move to DX11.x and see the potential and say "oh shit that is hot we need that". I have massive hopes for UE4 and how it should help push the industry to DX11.x.
Yeah looks like it will give pretty large performance boosts and some other cool things I really hope it takes off too. If the new consoles where coming out too that help push DX11.x for sure I would think.
Sigh, yeah you are right I don't want to admit it for my own agenda and vision thinks differently but its true, just got to really hope the new DX11.x engines stir the juices once again and help innovate the visuals and games.-
Keep the faith man :) There is going to be some awesome sauce in the coming few years, but my feeling though is that it's going to be in the field of AI and virtual intelligence-lead animation. Being unable to differentiate between a human character, and one procedurally generated would in my opinion be the next step.
The one thing people yearn for is interaction, and while there will always be a market for the twitch shooters and military AAA genre, (no one's going to stop and stare at tesselation in a war zone) there's a great deal more use for DX11 and eventually 12 in a new realm of human-computer interaction. If you could take your hardware setup, and put it all into visual head-ware apparatus, envelop yourself in a world, and people, where you have no concept of any differentiation between the real world and virtual, I believe that's where the advancing APIs are heading to, and that's where they'll be put to good use. So when Carmack says "meh" it's because he's waiting, - for the ability to do something like just this. I think Microsoft and the major GPU vendors can deliver.
It's a waiting-game Valcan_S. Luckily we're right on the cusp of seeing some truly incredible changes to how we play and view games. All we need is a little patience. ;)-
I really hope so, you have some nice ones that I really hope advance and I think they will, better AI, animation and NPC that have AI in terms of communicating that make you want to talk to would be a massive improvement to all games. I hope it happens its only a matter of time like you said.
Bring it I am READY \m/
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As you said, I think they just sort of realize that there's diminishing returns on bleeding edge graphics using current techniques. It ties in with why he's more excited about the VR stuff, which is where there's a potentially substantial difference in the overall experience.
I think the realtime lighting and kismet in UE4 are the sort of things that will make a huge difference, where you're able to leverage faster design iteration rather than raw pixel generation. -
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You're not going to see people doing much with this stuff until the next generation of consoles.
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Smaller PC focused developers might use the stuff. CDProjekt and the Metro:Last Light guys are the only ones that come to mind.
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I still assume MS will release dx11.1 for win7 sometime in the future. SP2 update.
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What are the features besides DX11.1 and Metro that you're interested in?
And why couldn't DX11.1 be run on Windows 7? -
why would Carmack of all people give a shit about a new DirectX
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Because his games all use opengl?
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I expect it to offer better cross platform compatibility any release now! But yes, I can see that PoV
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You've got Blizzard and Valve, who both want their stuff to work on everything for the past decade, and id, who's in love with OpenGL. Epic and Crytek and Bethesda are the one's who's opinions I care about when it comes to new stuff (outside of just their new stuff).
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The fact that he is saying that there hasn't been big improvement in Windows for id since XP I think just shows that the OS is no longer the bottle neck. Really, it just means developers have fewer excuses as to why PC gaming development is hard or something they don't like to do.
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This means nothing. Carmack is a genius, but he is pretty irrelevant these days. I said it.
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His work on rocketry is far, far more important to the Human race, I'd rather he focus on that. Seriously.
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Don't confuse id's failure to create a compelling game of RAGE with Carmack's current contributions. The open source ports of id games to iOS, releasing idTech4 as GPL alone are big. RAGE didn't light the world on fire, but the work he's doing on idTech5 will be around for quite a while, and is well suited to forward thinking tech like cloud streaming.
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That is what I was getting at. I doubt he's looking at Windows 8 from a rocket science point of view.
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Thank the heavens that you know everything and are here to let us know who we can trust!
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So. Goddamn. Brave. /tearful salute
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Right. On the one hand, I've got a brilliant programmer and rocket scientist, and on the other hand I've got... Some enthusiastic Shackers who are light on evidence, and Microsoft's marketing department. And somewhere in between is an operating system that looks like an attempt to copy iOS and paste it onto the desktop.
But Rage wasn't too amazing, so FUCK YOU JOHN CARMACK, WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ANYTHING-
so if Epic says they like Windows 8 where does that piece of evidence fit in?
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I would find that to be compelling. If they said it. Did they say it? I don't think they said it.
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In wish list form: http://m.pcgamer.com/2011/03/04/mark-rein-calls-for-curated-app-store-in-windows-8
Post announcement of said feature: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-8-App-Store-Is-Great-for-PC-Gaming-Epic-Games-Boss-Says-220857.shtml
App stores solve so many important problems for developers, problems far more pressing than a new version of DirectX/OpenGL, and that's been the case for awhile. MS tried before to have an app store to solve some of these issues years ago (it was called the Windows Marketplace). It's really little surprise that a few of the companies involved in owning a delivery platform are less enthusiastic than those who don't (while those less enthusiastic folks have been happily putting apps on iOS).-
I don't care if there's an app store, so long as it's completely optional. I don't entirely see why that needs to be an operating system feature.
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then you don't understand the biggest problems facing modern developers or average users and why iOS has been as successful as it has.
And the app store is optional for the x86/x64 version, you're free to find and install your traditional Windows apps (like Steam and existing games) as you always have.
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I linked to specific quotes where they did
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why does that matter?
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Word from someone who actually writes code/knows wtf is better than word of soul selling exec. Well, imo anyway.
I guess the one thing about these threads that really gets me: why the fuck does anyone care enough to generate this much conversation. New windows OS = meh. It's going to suck until sp1, and until then there's not much sense in forming an opinion.-
A feature could be extremely useful to the business that coder works for without impacting his programming process, and he may or may not be aware of what or why that is.
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Windows 8 is the new Windows Vista / Windows ME, you heard it here first
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ME sucked, the hate for Vista was overblown, I used it as a work OS for 2 years with no problems.
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I thought Vista was okay, but the back-end changes and the driver makers playing catch-up meant I couldn't do a lot of the things I could do on XP, and there was a bit of a performance hit on the things I could still do. By the time those problems had been fixed and my hardware was upgraded enough, Windows 7 was already close to release.
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To be fair, I started using Vista after it already had service pack 2.
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That was well after many of the performance problems were fixed; Vista RTM was far worse.
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Right, also "skip every other windows" and "metro for tablets good, desktop bad" amirite? You heard it here first my fucking ass. Same fucking circle jerk, different goddamned day.
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What would improve your desktop experience in a meaningful way?
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http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/22/designing-for-pcs-that-boot-faster-than-ever-before.aspx
As far as UI goes, I think you might find Metro does provide legitimate improvements even on the desktop. For instance, always getting to an apps settings in the same place/way, likewise for searching an app.
As far as homegroups go for simplifying sharing between machines, I'd say the next step is cloud syncing of various other things between machines, namely apps and settings, but also files themselves. Win8 does that. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/02/cloud-services-for-windows-8-and-windows-phone-windows-live-reimagined.aspx (and since you mentioned printing http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/07/25/simplifying-printing-in-windows-8.aspx)
Then there're all sorts of other improvements for performance and battery life and such, ex http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/07/23/hardware-accelerating-everything-windows-8-graphics.aspx and other posts on that blog -
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We have machines at work runnin Win8. Have since we could download it.
I hate Metro. I love my Win7 start menu. I don't care if I get compared to abrasion (I wish I were that dreamy!), nothing about the Metro UI improves my workflow or benefits me in any way. It not being optional is going to keep me off of Win8 for longer than otherwise.
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Personal Slayer audio greeting when it starts up.
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I'm buying it for the boot time
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I imagined Duke Nukem saying this as he kicks a guy with his pixelated foot and then he says "Come get some"
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I am Sparticus kill9!
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Nor do I. I think it's basically Windows 7 with the addition of a UI to power a new round of tablets. Work will likely provide me with a copy before too long and with it being free, I'll probably install it as I will end up coming across it during my job, but I'm not as pumped for it as I was for 7. Win7 is pretty much OS perfection.
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I don't understand why he expects Microsoft to bend over backwards to assist game development. They make an operating system that goes on something like 90% of the consumer PCs. Maybe 10% of those actually play demanding PC games on them these days.
If you want to capitalize on that huge set of customers, it's on you to build stuff that works well, not Microsoft.-
I agree Microsoft should only create products for the user groups that make them the most money, FUCK EVERYBODY ELSE
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Or they satisfy as many customers as they can.
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They have a majority in the desktop OS market. OS X has a barrier of cost that limits its reach despite being a superior OS in many ways, and Linux has a barrier of usability/compatibility which offsets it being free. Windows holding the majority will continue.
From Microsoft's standpoint, why should they care about PC gaming when they can sell gamers into a separate console ecosystem? Most of those same people are already most likely on Windows anyway. It isn't surprising that they've thrown PC gaming under the bus when they can sell to some of their customers twice, it just isn't worth putting the resources into their development studios or OS in comparison. -
that's kinda how businesses operate, it so happens that a feature to satisfy someone costs time and money, which constraints what 'many' is in this case
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I kinda feel they peaked with QW...as much as I love Q2 and Q3...I think QW in retrospect was probably the best multiplayer they put out (though DOOM2 was amazing in its technologically primitive sort of way).
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