The Next Twenty Years: What Windows 8's Closed Distribution Means for Developers
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
I imagine that MSFT will have some kind of enterprise program where you can run your own Windows Store Server to do enterprise deploys of Metro apps.
Either way, it looks like Linux might end up the one place where you can install and run your own software over the long haul.
Still a fairly large hurdle to overcome, but I'm hoping Valve can at least break down the games one.
For one thing the XboX is a very closed platform run by Microsoft and there is no lack of violent games available there. I imagine this part of the agreement is simply an oversight that will be corrected in one form or another.
The only other possible way that this could play out if MS stubbornly don't want to allow adult content on computers is that anybody who wants to play games will switch to another platform, be it Android or Ubuntu or whatever.
The most likely dangerous thing that this could do for game developers would be if MS took control of launch dates for third party games so that they didn't clash with games they planned to heavily promote themselves or with preferred partners.
So maybe if you're an Indie developer you can't launch a game during the Xmas period if Halo 6 is due to come out or something like that.
They just released a Netflix app, and you can watch as many R-rated movies on it as you like. You can certainly view adult content with any Metro-enabled web browser. There's no way, as a corporation, that they're going to give up the revenue stream that is mature rated PC games.
Why should they? They don't have any reason to allow mature games, which certainly haven't been very common on consoles. It looks like PCs are headed in the same direction. Chances are these sorts of products will simply follow the path of least resistance and move to the web.
Edit: my bad, I'm not a big gamer, so I'm not familiar with the ratings terminology. When I said "mature" games, I was referring to games with adult content, not the games where you can shoot/kill people.
Can you elaborate on what you mean here? Microsoft publishes games that are designated with the M (Mature) rating. For example, see the Gears of War franchise, published by Microsoft Studios (formerly known as Microsoft Game Studios).
"Microsoft and Epic Games today announced that the Xbox 360 exclusive sold more than three million copies in its first week since release, cementing "Gears 3" as the biggest game of 2011 and catapulting the franchise beyond one billion dollars in lifetime sales." [1]
[1] http://epicgames.com/news/gears-of-war-3-soars-past-three-mi...
Edit: w1ntermute & freehunter: Thanks for the clarification!
PC Gamers who like R rated games have been a fair chunk of MSs user base for years now, thinking all the way back to 1991 and Wolfenstein 3D. Games are a big reason a lot of people are sticking with Windows as opposed to getting a Mac or trying Ubuntu.
Another factor to consider here might be that not all R rated content is considered equal, for example it appears that in America strong violence is less taboo than sex or swearing. So maybe Blood'n'Guts 3 gets an exception but Karma Sutra: The Game doesn't?
I also think it'll be quite some time before we have AAA game engines running nicely under WebGL.
Find it interesting that sex is deemed more "adult" than murder.
Everyone is gushing about the post-pc era, Eric Schmidt announced a few days ago that Microsoft is irrelevant, and the article takes for granted that Microsoft and PC as we know it will survive for next 20 years, and Windows will be dominant platform on PC?
If history teach us anything, it's that there's always some solution for the problem. If Windows 8 marketplace turns to be too restrictive, game developers will turn to Steam on Linux. And with enough gamers on Linux, Asus or Gigabyte will not be pressed to make only "compatible with Windows 8" UEFI-locked motherboards.
Or the consumers (and the gamers) will find Win8 marketplace acceptable. Or maybe in five or ten years some other player will sweep the market.
Looking at the current technology and lamenting about the end of the world is just plain stupid.
Star Trek did that with spaceships and AI. You can explore the galaxy way past lightspeed, but your computer can't put up the shields to save your life unless your captain yells "Shields!". Right.
Absolutely. I think this is the implication of the article.
> Looking at the current technology and lamenting about the end of the world is just plain stupid.
I didn't sense any "lamenting about the end of the world" -- rather the end of the status quo, where the 2011 GOTY was packaged exclusively for the most recent Windows platform.
Desktop apps don't have to be distributed through Windows Store. In fact they can not. Windows Store contains only Metro UI apps, available for both tablets and desktops. All the software and games and stuff are installed exactly the same way as in other Windowses, without any restrictions implied by the article. Steam isn't going anywhere, Skyrim, Mass Effect are not, either. The problem does not exist.
Steam and other apps may work fine now, but what happens in 10 years? That is the long-term issue this article is trying to bring up.
I'd say there's more of a risk for Metro developers that the platform will be EOL'd/legacy/forgotten in 5 years than there is a risk to traditional desktop devs.
I'm not seeing it. Metro's entire UI paradigm would seem to limit it to primarily content consumption apps and toys (games). For instance I don't think we'll ever see Photoshop or Ableton on metro as we know it today.
That's not to say creation apps won't exist - look at the iPad, you've got full office suites, music apps that emulate synthesizers with a great degree of fidelity, etc - but those are most definitely a niche.
If people want to use their desktop computers in such a way, why didn't they build the UI this way years ago?
Arguably things like screen in a terminal can be interpreted the same way. It's still a very awkward way of multitasking.
[1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/wind...
counts
24 windows open across 9 different applications.
2 is such an absurdly low limit as to be virtually useless.
The reason people are speaking up now is not out of fear of Windows 8, but out of fear of Windows 9 or 10.
Basically, IMO, the article didn't really have hard facts and was mainly just pushing slippery slope arguments. Whilst there's potential for this to become a closed platform, there's no evidence that it will be. The DOS/Win 3.0 similarity doesn't work because Win 3.0 did not close off the platform at all. There's been no precedence set on the desktop to close the platform off completely and I doubt it'd do MS any favours to do such a thing, especially when gamers will soon have Steam on Linux (which is the one thing stopping some gamers from moving from Windows to Linux).
The point is whether or not there Microsoft will be on the PC loading them. If so, how does Microsoft get from A to B? How do developers deal with the restrictions in the meantime?
Using extremes like this doesn't support an argument. There is no actual evidence (i.e. non-hypothetical) in the article that MS plans on losing the hardcore gamer demographic on the PC. I don't see any restrictions on developers that haven't existed before. Developers can still program desktop games and avoid the store, just like they've been doing all these years.
I feel there's this illusion where it's either the old, "open", Microsoft business model or the closed down Apple model. There can be a middle area where certain form factors, such as tablets, can benefit profit-wise from a closed down system (iPad, WinRT) and other form factors, like the desktop, can benefit from a dual system (ie consumers can opt for the store, or just download like normal). This notion that MS has and will fully lock down all their platforms seems unlikely to me personally.
A developer can't write a program that integrates with the preferred UI on the latest version of Windows without conforming to an approval process.
This is indeed a huge change for 3rd party developers on the Microsoft platform.
However, that's a fair comment regarding apps in general, and I agree with that. But developers aren't being forced to use the store, so if they don't want to meet market demands (if there is any - Metro with a mouse has had mixed reviews), that's their choice. MS has never been in a position to dictate this sort of choice before, so it's impossible for that type of restriction to have occurred before.
Apple can get away with it (or close to it) because they are still not the dominant platform.
I suspect we'll get to a point where the App Store, Google Play and Microsoft Store (not sure what Microsoft's is called) will be considered monopolizing the sales channel and be decoupled forcing competition in the store space, or allowing software to be installed without going through a store at all.
Thankfully we've got history on our side with installing apps from any source being the default behavior.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh69408...
And their user agreement is friendlier to FOSS projects than Apple's.
c. Third Party Rights. Your app, including any app that contains FOSS, must not infringe or misappropriate any intellectual property or personal right of any third party. You will obtain and maintain all necessary rights, clearances and consents, and pay all performance, licensing and reuse fees, including any consideration associated with providing music or video related content in and through your app. If your app includes FOSS, you must comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms, including any source availability requirements.
d. FOSS Software. If your app includes FOSS, it must not cause any non-FOSS Microsoft software to become subject to the terms of any FOSS license.He's talking about this, mass censorship that many of today's games and TV shows cannot pass:
5.1 Your app must not contain adult content, and metadata must be appropriate for everyone
5.2 Your app must not contain content that advocates discrimination, hatred, or violence based on membership in a particular racial, ethnic, national, linguistic, religious, or other social group, or based on a person’s gender, age, or sexual orientation
5.3 Your app must not contain content or functionality that encourages, facilitates or glamorizes illegal activity
5.4 Your app must not contain or display content that a reasonable person would consider to be obscene
5.5 Your app must not contain content that is defamatory, libelous or slanderous, or threatening
5.6 Your app must not contain content that encourages, facilitates or glamorizes excessive or irresponsible use of alcohol or tobacco products, drugs or weapons
5.7 Your app must not contain content that encourages, facilitates or glamorizes extreme or gratuitous violence, human rights violations, or the creation or use of weapons against a person or animal in the real world
5.8 Your app must not contain excessive or gratuitous profanity
It's worth pointing out that Google has roughly the same requirements in their Google Play content requirements( http://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html ), as do Apple and Amazon.
Google's ratings requirements are potentially even more stringent, especially because they're in plain English.
Oh so content-makers are complaining that Youtube steals their traffic? Clearly there's enough content on Youtube to justify a ban under any of those rules and Google is not exactly on Microsoft's list of favorites.
Let's also remember the apps banned by Apple for being "offensive". Were they obnoxious, definitely, to some people at least. However that's censorship. And it's OK as long as controlled platforms are a minority, but when it becomes a monopolizing problem leaving consumers with no choices left, then it should really be against the law.
I have trouble accepting this argument. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon are not preventing the production of that content. They're simply refusing to sell it, which is their prerogative.
That's not censorship, at all. It's no different from any of the major big-box chains refusing to sell things because of content.
Since people are going to increasingly consume things on computers this provides a level of censorship power that would disgust people if it were proposed by a government.
Stop sensationalizing, please.
GTA, of course. Game of Thrones. World of Warcraft (glamorises irresponsible drinking). The Godfather. Breaking Bad. 24. Titus Andronicus.
Yeah, I'm not wicked happy about the potential for censorship here. And this stuff goes a fair bit beyond normal hosting-level ass-covering, too.
The point is that we should be very unexcited about the walled garden approach because it will exclude a lot of cool and fun and useful software. Even if they make an exception for high-grossing software, the whole idea is still a bad one.
The problem is: how many billion-dollar markets are we nipping in the bud because we operate strictly in a walled garden?
That's my argument - "a few" edge cases aren't actually that few, and these are edge cases with the potential to grow into hugely productive industries.
Under the current scheme, DOOM would never have been released, and the multi-billion dollar action/shooter games industry would be dead on arrival.
Applying the same standards to textual content, sites like Reddit and Digg would never have been approved (in fact Reddit apps on the App Store are rated 18+, a rating strictly disallowed in MS's scheme), and we would never have seen the explosion of link aggregation.
These few edge cases aren't that few, and they aren't that edge casey.
The problem with not allowing for 'edge cases' is that a lot of popular software probably started as a weird 'edge case'.
Except there won't.
Imagine:
1. No third-party browsers.
2. No non-whitelisted sites viewable in the default browser (except maybe in "legacy mode", meaning no scripts, no videos and the browser censors the text.)
3. If you're lucky, there will be an "adult mode", where you can access URLs with adult content (but the "guardians" will be notified of each URL in real-time, along with your name and address. Not the NSA, and not in secret, but one of the filtering companies we know today. And everyone living in the same street as you will get a "Warning! pervert in neighbourhood!" alert.)
This isn't a cyberpunk movie.
(happens to be much more readable there, too)
If that would happen, GNU/Linux would be the biggest remaining open (biggest free it is already) operating system. That would be a good thing. If Microsoft really tries to control Windows-Apps that much that they ban popular games, they probably will kill Windows and games will adapt to Linux. Fine with me.
But it doesn't have to come that way. The comparison to DOS is probably flawed. The new UI is, as far as i understood without being a windows developer, just an UI (with maybe a new API). The classical desktop is not like DOS an operating system Windows has to evolve from. Though it's quite possible that they might try to kill it sometime, it is not the same technical cause like the move away from DOS.
Anyway, before declaring Windows dead, let's wait how well Windows 8 sells and how many will use the new UI and the Windows store.
OSX and Android are both open and both have larger install-bases than GNU/Linux. Linux is fourth in the pecking order of open operating systems, or third if you only mean desktop computers.
>Though it's quite possible that they might try to kill it sometime, it is not the same technical cause like the move away from DOS.
It's not about any technical cause. The argument is that users will flock towards the new method of interacting with computers, the same way they went headlong towards the windows/mouse/icon thing and the developers will be forced to follow suit, and thereby become slaved to Microsoft (or alternatively, run off and join the GNU/Linux/Android circus).
The users didn't care whether DOS was an operating system or Windows 95 was just a shell on DOS 6 point whatever. They just wanted to be able to run their mission-critical applications like Word and Excel and Solitaire without having to learn and then invoke inscrutable command line incantations like 'DIR' and 'FORMAT A:' and 'ECHO c:\XCOM\XCOM.EXE > c:\AUTOEXEC.BAT'.
Microsoft thinks the same thing is going to happen with our Brave New Tabletized World; they'll keep the old desktop-style around as a legacy, but they'll exert control over anything touchscreeny, and let nature take it's course.
And I still think the different technical situation influences the situation, it is not only about the UI (and the jump not as big as the jump away from DOS).
Slippery slopes are fun to think about, but are difficult to form a logical and rational argument with. You can't base decisions on a slippery slope. All we have are the facts currently available today.
Today we have one version of Windows being sold. Next week we'll have three (Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows RT)! What if the week after that we end up with six versions of Windows?!
This kind of thinking is essential for a court system. That's why we say that justice is blind. But if you are not in the middle of a lawsuit, you should not use this type of thinking.
Thinking about trends and creating testable theories is essential for polity planing. You can't prepare for the future if you don't make projections about it.
It's been a year since Microsoft announced Windows 8's restrictions. That's a pretty darn good run-up time, industry-wide. If/when they do put in some new restrictions, it's not going to be sprung on anyone overnight. All these articles are doing is spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about something that may or may not come to pass.
At least with Linux you have multiple distributions and the source code available so if you don't like a particular decision it can just be forked.
The article is talking more about 20 years down the line.
OS X Mountain Lion is a little fussy about apps from the Internet that did not come from the APple App Store, but it is easy enough to override this default on an app by app basis.
I would hope that Microsoft would also allow users to override this restriction. e.g., installing Emacs.
I keep reading that windows 8 distribution is limited to the ms store for apps with metro UI , but that doesn't seem to be the case from my limited experience.
Can anyone clarify?
So I'm just confused why it worked for me.
There are three exceptions:
1. You can add self-signed certificates and side-load. This is actually quite
easy for developers, but a no-go for most people;
2. You can push corporate apps out to Windows 8 Enterprise devices; and finally,
the way Chrome is doing this, which is
3. Browsers are treated really, really specially.
It is this exception that Chrome (and, in beta, Firefox) is exploiting.
This trick only works for browsers. And, further, the way it's implemented is an insanely stupid horrible pain in the ass. I really like IE10 for tablet browsing: it's very fast, it has outstanding touch support, and it's actually a great rendering engine. On the other hand, you can pry Chrome out of my cold, dead, festering corpse's fingers when I'm on Windows 8's desktop. So the logical thing would be to use IE in Metro, and Chrome on the desktop.
But you know what? You can't sanely do that. Only the default browser gets to live in Metro. And when I say default, I really mean default. If you set Chrome as your default browser, then you cannot launch Metro IE--the ONLY Metro browser you can launch is Chrome.
It's the little things like this that are making it REALLY hard for me to stay a Windows 8 supporter. The more I use it, the more the little, idiotic things like this are making me go crazy.
Excuse me while I go pick up my eyes that rolled across the office floor.
Please. This sort of slippery slope fearmongering belongs in a Gutmann article, not a HN comment. It's BS when someone says it about Apple, and it's BS when someone says it about Microsoft. There will always be a need for general purpose computers that can run anything.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12008252/sideloading-apps...
Between this and UEFI secure boot these guys are really messing up the PC ecosystem.
Because that's not true. Secure boot is turned on, but for Windows 8 certification, it must be able to be disabled by the user. Microsoft is mandating that PC builders give you the option to disable secure boot. So I don't see how this is changing really anything. Maybe you can explain.
The only exception to the ARM rule in recent years has been Android, in a niche market, and only on some devices. That's not changing either.
Only because there's never been a port of Windows to ARM before.
If you want to claim locked-bootloader Windows RT devices represent a new class of hardware like, say, the Kindle, then I guess we'll have to see how they end up relating to the rest of the market.
assuming there would be a way to distribute that installer other than microsoft's store