Microsoft offers 'open' app store to draw regulators away from Activision takeover Microsoft, a monopolist of yore that recently disallowed third-party browsers from handling a protocol associated with its Edge browser, has pledged to uphold a set of Open App Store Principles for the Microsoft Store on Windows and future game marketplaces. "We have developed these principles in part to address Microsoft's …
Microsoft can take their Windows 8.x "Developer License" and fsck off.
The amount of hours I spent having to get that crap working with our build server.... I almost feel that I deserve compensation from Microsoft for hours wasted. In the end it wasn't worth it anyway; we never bothered releasing for their store. Old fashioned centralized crap.
Typical bafflegab. The real issue with Activision/Blizzard is not the app store but monopoly in the game development space. I do not trust the Rejects from Redmond to release most of there game titles to competitors' devices. They would try to force you to buy the Xbox or some other method of lining their coffers with ill-gotten gains. I home the regulators tell them to 'sod off Swampy'.
You know, every company I worked for had a "Mission Statement." It looked good; it sounded good. Some were even motivational.
But they had very little to do with day to day operation of the business.
Let's try knocking your percentage down to something sane like 10% up to $20 max on a product sale. Seems like a fair way to allow for the "Office on iOS" positioning; time to lead instead of bluster and blather platitudes.
One I'd like to see Apple adopt.
So nice to see that the worst enemy of the richest company in the world is the next-richest company in the world (they're in that ballpark anyways).
Ah, to think that there was a day when Apple was only 5% of the market . . .
The Mac is still less than 20% of the market. Windows takes almost all the rest.
For the laptop and desktop, Apple is as the song goes, 'Nowhere man'.
My guess is that Apple is deliberately staying well clear of the 'games console' market.
Imagine the brouhaha that there would be if it was Apple buying Activision... There would already be several hundred lawsuits alleging monopolistic behaviour... yet MS seems to be able to get away with this scot-free.
What next for MS? Buying Nvidia? Buying Arm (now that Nvidia has pulled out)?
Watch this space. SatNad is not done with his expansion plans yet.
This
We will not use any non-public information or data from our app store to compete with developers' apps.
And my name is Emperor Donald J Trump and I didn't steal classified documents from the White House.
MS seems to be buying anything and everything it can and building its walled garden even higher than ever while maintaining that the gates into it will never be locked or become tolls.
MS never gained control of the mobile platform market, so now they're trying to devalue control of platforms. If they had got control, they would now be the incumbent making money hand over fist on 45% fees to be considered an "ISV".
I am curious to know whether these principles will apply to the store on the XBox as well, or if it's considered separate.
Installing? What installing? Is a program installed when I put it in a folder called "programs"? I agree, it's so easy to rephrase discussions by using a term like this. It's some binary, I'd like my CPU to execute it. THANK YOU VERY MUCH, GOOD DAY SIR.
Given that this is about a gaming acquisition, shouldn't this be talking about access to alternative stores on their gaming devices?
The lack of competition for downloadable games on console has meant prices which are usually (barring occasional sales long after release) much more expensive than buying physical media.
I recognise that this is done partly to keep game retailers on-side, due to their role in selling hardware, but by cutting out the costs of physical distribution, including cutting out the role of distributers and shops who would previously taken a cut of the profit, and by forcing the use of their payment systems, then Microsoft (and Sony) now make hugely excessive profits when selling games digitally.
Microsoft's words here about not stopping alternative ways of purchasing games on Windows is all well and good, but they lost that fight many years ago. Making this statement now does not change the status quo in any meaningful way.
If they were truly looking to do the right thing, they would be offering Epic, Valve, Humble and anybody else who wants to, the ability to set up competing digital storefronts on the Xbox consoles. Hopefully this would start to drive console game prices down to the market value, as demonstrated by much cheaper PC prices for the same games.
Not used the MS Store for a while, so perhaps this has changed, but last time I did (on Win 10 maybe 3 years ago? *), you could only set installation location for Store apps under a global OS setting, and this was simply a drive letter choice and for all Store apps.
That works fine (to varying degrees of fine), if all you have is a single drive (aka C:), or you're just installing small things, a different calculator etc. And you're happy for them to sit on a single drive.
But if you're installing games, especially modern AAA games that can easily be 50GB+, many hit over 100GB these days. This can be a pain, as you might want game 1 on D: and game 2 on E: etc.
For myself, if they really want to be serious about game installations via the MS Store on Windows, then you need more flexibility to be able to pick the target drive at install time, on a per application/game basis, and also preferably have the option to move the install, without having to remove and download again.
* For ref, I've never bought anything from the MS Store myself, but I have had a few MS Store codes for things like bundled AAA games that came with various bits of hardware over recent years (Motherboard, GFX card etc).
Each time, it would insist on installing everything to C: which I try to keep clean of things like games, and the only other option seemed to be the global setting to install everything to a different drive, but as mentioned this was a global change for everything from the Store.
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