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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

> To date, Microsoft has done... nothing I'm aware of... to lock down PC gaming.

DX12 is a form of lock-in.

Unless you are writing your own, all the major game engines support multiple graphics apis anyway.

It doesn't contradict what I said above. Supporting multiple APIs is a burden, whether it falls on those who write their own engines, or those who write those engines for others to use. You can view it as a tax which increases costs and reduces efficiency. The point of lock-in is exactly such tax, which will deter some from using anything else, or at the very least make it more expensive for those who will use something else. This tax is passed to the end user either way, in the form of slower progress, higher prices, unavailability on other platforms and so on.

i would argue that having only one universal graphics api would hurt innovation and progress, so it's not perfect either. MS is not even the worst anyway, Apple is even forcing Vulkan do use Metal under the hood.

> i would argue that having only one universal graphics api would hurt innovation and progress, so it's not perfect either.

In general, you could argue that more competition helps progress, yes. But it's not even the case here, since walled gardens (Xbox, PS, iOS, etc.) prevent competing APIs like Vulkan from being used on them. I.e. they don't compete on merit (which could boost progress), they are anti-competitive. So they only slow down progress in this case.

To Windows? Sure. But not remotely in the way Newell and Sweeney are suggesting it'll lock you into the Windows Store. They're primarily concerned with Steam being viable on Windows.

And DirectX 12 is not any more a lock-in than any other version of DirectX since the beginning of DirectX, as far as I'm aware. (And games can and are offered with both DirectX and OpenGL support.)

Responses going forward heavily delayed because I'm rate-limited. If you want to talk elsewhere at any point, I am @ocdtrekkie

> To Windows? Sure. But not remotely in the way Newell and Sweeney are suggesting it'll lock you into the Windows Store.

Yes, they were focused more on distributor lock-in, but lock-in has different forms. Since you were talking about PC gaming in general, saying that MS did nothing to lock it, I pointed out that it's not so. System lock-in is still a lock-in, which MS uses to put competition at a disadvantage.

I singled out DX12 more specifically, because some argued that OpenGL was too much behind / not really moving forward, and so on. Vulkan isn't any of that, and MS not backing the effort instead of making NIH DX12 can't use any of the above excuses. They clearly made DX12 for lock-in purposes.

> And games can and are offered with both DirectX and OpenGL support.

On Xbox developers have no choice, but to use DX.

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