The war against Microsoft’s latest OS is going strong. A couple of days ago, Gabe Newell revealed that Windows 8 would be a catastrophe for game makers. Gabe believes that they (Valve) will lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market, and that margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. And that’s precisely why Valve is currently investing in Linux. But Newell is not the only one believing that Windows 8 will damage game developers.
Blizzard’s Rob Pardo, StarCraft designer and current vice president of game design at Diablo III, also believes that Windows 8 will be awful for Blizzard.
After Gabe’s interview, Rob Pardo tweeted that Blizzard is also not happy with Microsoft’s latest OS:
“Nice interview with Gabe Newell—‘I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space’—not awesome for Blizzard either.”
According to reports, the reason why both Newell and Pardo are upset with Windows 8 is its closed, rumored, nature. It appears that Microsoft is pulling a Mac OS X thing with Windows 8, soemthing that will give them the ability to monitor the applications that run on its OS. However, this will have a huge impact to Windows’ openness, a feature that makes PCs so great these days.
Notch has also agreed with what Newell said:
“I hope we can keep a lot of open and free platforms around. If Microsoft decides to lock down Windows 8, it would be very very bad for Indie games and competition in general.
If we can keep open platforms around, there’s going to be a lot of very interesting games in ten years, mixed in with the huge AAA games that we all love.”
It will be interesting to see how game developers will react, and whether they decide to create Windows 8-only games to force gamers into upgrading to Microsoft’s next operating system.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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