By Nelson Schneider - 03/13/16 at 02:59 PM CT
I have been extoling the virtues of the death of Xbox as a line of consoles and its rebirth as a dedicated gaming platform within the Windows operating system for years. With Windows 10, it seemed that Microsoft finally saw reason and decided to move toward merging Windows and Xbox into a single platform. Unfortunately, Microsoft is no longer a company that innovates, but is instead a company that mimics already-established technologies. And instead of mimicking Valve’s Steam or CD Projekt’s GOG, which are both loved by PC gamers, they decided to mimic Apple’s iTunes, which is hated by everyone with the least bit of technological savvy.
Microsoft’s job of uniting Windows and Xbox should have been painfully easy. Of course, Microsoft already tried (and failed) to create a unified PC gaming platform with the horrible always-online DRM known as Games for Windows LIVE, so they have a history of screwing-up the implementation of such things. Microsoft’s current debacle is the company’s attempt to use their proprietary Windows Store to control all facets of PC gaming through the Universal Windows Platform (UWP, formerly known as Windows Metro).
As someone who values simplicity in PC gaming, the UWP seems like it would be a great proposition. Instead of dealing with programs that constantly screw around with the Windows Registry, demand higher user privileges than they technically need to run, that hide their save files all over the damned hard drive, and can hang the entire system if they misbehave, UWP “apps” (not “programs,” like a traditional windows.exe file) are perpetually sandboxed and isolated from each other and the core of the underlying OS.
The problem lies in the way Microsoft has implemented UWP. Specifically, the key issue with the entire setup is that UWP apps are very thoroughly hidden and locked-away from the user and can only be acquired (currently) from the Windows Store. The Windows Store installs all UWP apps to a hidden directory within Program Files called ‘WindowsApps.’ In a typical situation, a user could simply unhide this directory (or view hidden files OS-wide) and poke around inside it in order to have traditional access to the software on their machine. With WindowsApps, however, this is made very, very difficult by the fact that an automated system process called “TrustedInstaller” is the official “owner” of the directory, and it is impossible even for an administrative user to simply change the necessary permissions required to even look in the directory, let alone manipulate the files contained therein, without resorting to some esoteric command line nonsense. What if a user wants to back-up their UWP apps to external media? What if a user wants to move their UWP apps to a drive other than the OS drive? Nope! That’s not happening with UWP, as Microsoft has ensured that the OS itself will fight the user at every turn.
Of course, the DRM/control/privacy issue with UWP is just the elephant in the room. Other problems with the platform include the fact that it is never full-screen, and can thus misbehave when PC gamers try to use UWP apps in conjunction with traditional programs that run in the background, like frame-per-second counters and control binders. Some developers aren’t happy about UWP either, as they perceive that it will take just as much control away from them as it does the users who buy their software.
Unfortunately, UWP isn’t the only thing Microsoft has screwed up lately with regard to the Xbox on Windows movement. The XBONE controller, the very nice successor to the Xbox 360 controller, is supposed to provide the same plug-and-play simplicity as its predecessor and other Xinput standard controllers. But it doesn’t! I recently was forced to do a clean install of my entire Windows 10 OS because a file called “xboxgip.sys” kept causing random Blue Screens of Death and because certain games built in the Unity Engine acted like I was always pushing left on the left analog stick whenever an XBONE controller was plugged in (but not when an X360 controller was plugged it). I concluded that the fault lay firmly at the feet of an updated XBONE device driver that never cleanly deleted the previous driver when it installed with the Windows 10 1511 update. Using the built-in OS “refresh” option to repair the system would have been ideal, but with no drive big enough to hold my Steam and GOG libraries, I simply bought a new drive, did a clean install, and migrated my games over to the new drive. The good news is that the clean install did fix these major issues I was having with the XBONE controller. The bad news is that going in with a clean set of XBONE drivers revealed to me that 19 out of the 60 Xinput compatible games in my Steam “Completed” category don’t recognize the XBONE controller as they should, or generally behave strangely while an XBONE controller is connected to the system. If this trend holds with games I haven’t personally tested, it means that somehow Microsoft has broken Xinput compatibility with over a quarter of all Xinput games! Microsoft may have finally provided us with an official ChatPad driver with the XBONE controller, but they really need to get it together and fix the fact that the new device isn’t recognized as identical to its predecessor in all situations.
I still don’t think Microsoft’s stake in gaming is beyond redemption. If the company draws back the Iron Curtain between UWP apps, users, and developers, I can foresee a future where UWP apps thrive, perhaps even a future where UWP apps are sold on Steam and the Windows Store simultaneously. Likewise, if Microsoft can iron-out the bugs afflicting the XBONE controller’s interaction with the Xinput standard, they will be able to provide excellent gaming hardware on par with Valve’s Steam controller and an ease-of-use experience on par with a traditional console. The key to a brighter future for Microsoft is simply NOT following Apple, or even Android, down the path of walled-gardens and operating systems that restrict even administrative users from performing certain activities. Windows already has a low-privilege user mode; there is no reason to lock things down further. Windows is the uncontested home of PC gaming because of its openness and the freedom to play all sorts of games, ranging from emulated classics, to homebrew, to Indie titles, to mainstream “AAA” swill. Simplicity at the expense of freedom simply will not fly on the platform, especially when excellent gaming clients like Steam and GOG Galaxy have already proven that simplicity and freedom can indeed co-exist.
