Posted on Monday, March 07 2016 @ 13:40 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney blasted Microsoft for trying to monopolize the PC gaming market. In
a piece written for Guardian, Sweeney urges game developers to oppose Microsoft's new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative as he sees this as an attempt by Microsoft to lock down the PC ecosystem and monopolize software distribution and commerce. Here's a small snip from the article, the full editorial also lists several solutions Sweeney would like to see.
In my view, this is the most aggressive move Microsoft has ever made. While the company has been convicted of violating antitrust law in the past, its wrongful actions were limited to fights with specific competitors and contracts with certain PC manufacturers.
This isn’t like that. Here, Microsoft is moving against the entire PC industry – including consumers (and gamers in particular), software developers such as Epic Games, publishers like EA and Activision, and distributors like Valve and Good Old Games.
Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP, and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem. They’re curtailing users’ freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers.
Microsoft issued the following response to Sweeney's allegations:
In response to Sweeney's allegations, Kevin Gallo, corporate vice president of Windows at Microsoft, told the Guardian: "The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX required."
