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Tim Sweeney: MS plans to make Steam 'progressively worse' & buggy via Win10 updates

Alx

Member
It really sounds paranoid and it's just gratuitous speculation at this point. Anyway, if MS started to do such things, I don't see anything preventing Valve from patching Steam to fix whatever is broken in an update. Isn't that actually their job right now ?
 

dxdy

Banned
or the new Windows 10 warning that pops up if you're using Chrome or Firefox to say they're power inefficient and you should use Edge:

There's a difference between not-so-subtle advertising and deploying an update that would e.g. artificially drain battery when Chrome is detected. Power issues of those browsers were known long before Edge was released.
 

hesho

Member
Can they do it yeah, will they do it no it would be platform suicide.

it wouldn't be suicide if all the users are already on that platform. How many more win10 users will be out there in 5 years.

I am amazed at how many ppl that are brushing off sweeney's comments... They don't really know microsoft very well..
 

Cranster

Banned
Yep. Since then we've experienced several other initiatives by MS that aimed at limiting consumer choice and freedom in order to strengthen their hold on key markets. DRM for the Bone being the most recent.

And then you've got the whole GFWL fiasco.
You mean a DRM plan that was reversed before it even launched? And since when is GFWL the same as deliberately sabotaging a competitors service?
 

wapplew

Member
True, MS have pulled some shit back then, but they are not the same unstoppable force like they were in the 90s.
They don't have that much control in tech anymore. If they try something like the past, their competitions will eat them alive. Openness is they only advantage they have, they won't risk that.
 

Maztorre

Member
That's the main issue. He isn't saying he "thinks" this will happen. He's saying it will in fact happen and it is in fact happening already. That's some crazy accusation right there.

They're heavily pushing an executable format that is incompatible with elements of Steam like the overlay, and that directly works against key features of Steam (e.g. serving a wide array of modded/user-generated content). It is already happening.
 
Looks like Tim isn't the only one who needs a tinfoil hat judging by this thread.

Come on we all know MS would prefer steam out of the picture. The end goal of most companies in this business is to eliminate the competition or make them irrelevant. I think any move they make will be inspected and acted on immediately, but they will still try. They haven't gotten past the first obstacle though. Easing people into it. This is gonna be a long term thing.
 

bitbydeath

Member
539e666f1536723967b33856_ramsay_happy_ending_lighter.png
 
J

JoJo UK

Unconfirmed Member
As owner of the OS it's a misuse of the notification system. It may or may not be true this week, but that really doesn't matter. They can run all the full page ads or sponsored content in magazines and websites that they like, or even run a huge banner ad when you start up Windows 10.

Should Google also be allowed to hook into Windows services to spy on what other apps are doing (Edge crashes 50% more often than other leading browsers, why not use Chrome?). But then they're not in a position where their competing browser automatically comes installed with the OS. We've pretty much been through this before, when Microsoft decided it was time to cut off Netscape's air supply. They've only recently come out from under anti-trust supervision for that one, yet already seem to falling back to old patterns of behaviour.
I would have loved this sort of notification system years ago when I was trying to get as much power out of my system as possible, it's a non issue to me now, also I think it's a bit over the top to say it's a misuse of the notification system, it's not forcing you to do anything (however I do see where you are coming from). In regards to Google hooking into windows services, when you visit Google in IE is the user not presented with 'why not use Chrome, it's the best' adds? Genuine question as I'm a Chrome user and in work ATM so cannot test.

This is kind of a backwards way of looking at it. They want those apps to go UWP so they can take cuts from them, so in reality they're in exactly the same precarious position that PC games are in now.

I don't doubt for a second that they're very slowly doing this. 'Embrace, Extend and Extinguish' is in Microsoft's DNA, and I don't believe for a second that just because different people (who have been with the company for years, and were part of the old guard's toxic culture) are running the show that the company has materially changed.

Whether this is extreme or not, I think people just saying this is tinfoil hat stuff are not looking into Microsoft's past too much.
I get what your saying about it being a backwards way of looking at thing however sitting in work right now, working in the banking industry for 15+ years the idea that the bank I work for (and ones I have previously) will be anywhere near close to switching to UWP in 5 years+ makes me laugh. The industry is so reliant on old systems the migration process would be an industry in itself. My wife is a teacher, the education system is just a bad. UK gaffer here, no idea what the rest of the world would be like, I did work for a US bank for a number of years who were better from an IT perspective, they still relied on some very old systems however.

MS may have these great (as in massive, not necessarily good) underlying plans but it's going to take a lot of time and a hell of a lot of money to drag some sectors into that future.
Honestly? I'm expecting that Microsoft will realise that Xbox Play Anywhere won't save the Windows 10 Store and subsequently the wider Metro project. Considering that the Win10Store has been on life support since pretty much day one of its life as the Windows 8 Store, Microsoft's loyalty to it has been admirable and really quite stupid.

Will eat crow and downgrade to Win7 if this turns out true.
lol I agree on both these points :D .
 
True, MS have pulled some shit back then, but they are not the same unstoppable force like they were in the 90s.
They don't have that much control in tech anymore. If they try something like the past, their competitions will eat them alive. Openness is they only advantage they have, they won't risk that.

you're assuming they're going to act rationally

rational isn't at the top of the list of words i'd use to describe the gaming side of microsoft corp.
 

Orca

Member
Sweeney's paranoia about Windows is getting ridiculous. It's not like Valve needs help to make Steam buggy.
 

Lucifon

Junior Member
Tim comes across as really salty against Microsoft recently. People believed what he was saying initially but now he just comes across as an idiot with an agenda.
 

MaulerX

Member
They're heavily pushing an executable format that is incompatible with elements of Steam like the overlay, and that directly works against key features of Steam (e.g. serving a wide array of modded/user-generated content). It is already happening.



What you just described has nothing to do with making Steam buggy. Valve is doing a great job all on their own with that.
 
Do people expect that, for example, future iterations of DirectX will support Win32 indefinitely?
Honestly? I'm expecting that Microsoft will realise that Xbox Play Anywhere won't save the Windows 10 Store and subsequently the wider Metro project. Considering that the Win10Store has been on life support since pretty much day one of its life as the Windows 8 Store, Microsoft's loyalty to it has been admirable and really quite stupid.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
I think I have footage of what Sweeney was doing before he posted that Tweet:

tumblr_mbyddeSauY1r9fil7o1_500.gif


What a load of fucking nonsense.

The problem is also that we cannot seem to distinguish the MS of Xbox and the MS of Windows and Office here so any comment about the latter must be console warrior nonsense against a company with history of anticompetitive behaviour and found guilty of abuse of monopoly and market manipulation before.
Would MS like to have the Apple App Store model? Yes. Does that go throughout go progressively tightening the OS? Yes. Do people value freedom and OS versatility over promise of safety and anti virus security? Everywhere else it seems people don't, it is hard to state why your PC OS would be any different.
Is it possible that a store app may require one day permissions to install and update UWP apps that MS likes to keep close to their chest for security reasons (side benefit of forcing the Windows Store)? Not a given for them to succeed, but it is not impossible.

Apple's macOS has moved the OS beyond the root user as well as its key apps (Xcode banned extensions outright by moving Xcode to a secure isolated process... if they do this to Finder and disable all the useful extensions for it then it will really be stupidly annoying :/).
 
Valve (And Blizzard. And EA. And Riot) would sooner abandon Windows for Linux than bow down to UWP.

Surely Microsoft isn't foolish enough.
 
The tricky part here is that there are two major simplifications in this argument:
a) MS cannot just screw Steam in a non-obvious way, they would have to screw whole WinAPI environment
b) Precisely to negate such theories, MS decided to promise UWP sideloading

With all that said, MS seems way more fixed on UWP than anything else. And that's not too good for reasons we iterated on already.
 

Oppo

Member
you guys are expressing disbelief at this?? why??

there's a multi decade history of behavior like this from MS. like, numerous examples as some have pointed out. this is not tin foil hat shit.i believe Gabe had some pretty drastic things to say about UWP way before Win10 came out as well.

also as Tim said, it won't be outright "breakage" but rather a series of hassles/performance issues that make it shitty to the user. you know, like MS did to QuickTime for PC. for ONE example.
 
Valve (And Blizzard. And EA. And Riot) would sooner abandon Windows for Linux than bow down to UWP.

Surely Microsoft isn't foolish enough.

Valve is a retail channel. EA and Blizzard are still primarily publishers, they will likely throw the towel in much faster and just go to whatever channel brings in more money.
 

saunderez

Member
This is literally happening on my PC right now.

Had all my video/audio associations set to Media Player Classic, but then all of a sudden everything got switched to MS's Groove player.

MPC wouldn't even show up when setting default apps; I had to completely uninstall and reinstall the software.

MS is shady as fuck.
So it's not just me. Someone less understanding might think their chosen application is having problems and continue to use the Microsoft suggested alternative. People like us ask to see the receipts and its clear theres no excuse for this shit.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Valve (And Blizzard. And EA. And Riot) would sooner abandon Windows for Linux than bow down to UWP.

Surely Microsoft isn't foolish enough.

as if their users will follow... MS would be banking that push comes to shove and people will not massively flock to Linux. So far this game of chicken has been won by Windows over and over, but hopefully Vulkan may change the name of the game for Linux as well.
 

Sweep14

Member
The only way UWA replace win32 in the future, is because UWA will be superior then, not some scummy tactic.
PC gamers are way to smart to let that happen, give us some credit Sweeney.

Remind me who drives the development of those 2 APIs...?

MS.

They have the means to progressively stop development of win32 and push UWP-UWA

If the game industry massively transit from win32 to UWP-UWA, you, as a PC gamer will have no other choice than to follow the movement.
 

EGM1966

Member
Came into thread thinking Sweeny was being tab hyperbolic while his concern was valid.

Left concerned at percentage of posters dismissing it outright and cracking jokes about Steam as if there isn't the slightest chance of this happening at all.

Just what would make pulling their usual shit tempting to them would be a complacent market place ignorant of their past actions.

The correct message to send is "they better have learnt not to try that shit again" not "nah MS wouldn't go that. Phil's great! Tim's mad!"
 

Zojirushi

Member
Wow people jumping in to defend Microsofts dick moves in this thread is super worrying to me.

This whole UWP/W10 store/closed platform app business is shady as fuck and should be watched very closely by everyone who appreciates the PC as an open platform. This has nothing to do with conspiracy theories or tinfoil hat BS.
 

Widge

Member
It's a pretty dicey game Microsoft are playing if true. This isn't like trying to shift an ad-hoc access of the internet from one service to another, this is actively looking to cut off users from a service that has huge monetary investment from their users.

For those with catalogues in the hundreds, there isn't going to be a simple "just swap" decision: people are going to switch to Valve's alternative OS, they are going to rip copies of Win 8 off the net / run from archive Win 10 versions. There is going to have to be a huge critical mass to get people shifting their catalogues from one ecosystem to the next. The amount of necessary double dipping is mind boggling.
 
All the people who are calling this crazy are too young to remember before Microsoft pushed out most of the competition in the OS market and then so many other markets after that.
Any one remember Netscape Navigator? You probably couldn't be reading this forum without the contributions they made to the web and they are gone now because of Internet Explorer's monopoly. (United States v. Microsoft Corp.)
It could happen again to Valve. This is precisely reason Valve is pushing their games and other publishers to support Linux/SteamOS. The sooner gaming can ditch Windows and DirectX the better.

In short Gaben is LITERALLY PC gaming's messiah. OpenGL forever!
 
It's a pretty dicey game Microsoft are playing if true. This isn't like trying to shift an ad-hoc access of the internet from one service to another, this is actively looking to cut off users from a service that has huge monetary investment from their users.

For those with catalogues in the hundreds, there isn't going to be a simple "just swap" decision: people are going to switch to Valve's alternative OS, they are going to rip copies of Win 8 off the net / run from archive Win 10 versions. There is going to have to be a huge critical mass to get people shifting their catalogues from one ecosystem to the next. The amount of necessary double dipping is mind boggling.

Good way of putting it. I can't see this happening ever from that perspective. Not sure how the law plays into this but the fact that it would affect millions of users would not be something that you sweep under the rug.
 

Moosichu

Member
I'm shocked at the reactions in this thread. Tim Sweeny is one of the smartest guys in the industry. Microsoft have tried this many times before (sometimes they got caught and failed). They may not be doing it, they may decide the PR is not worth it, but they've been refusing to deny doing it and talking around the issue which itself should be worrying enough.
 

kinoki

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
MS is petty enough to do this. I doubt they'll get away with it. Valve will drag them to court before it happens.
 
I don't get why people think it is out of the realm of possibility that Microsoft would shit up Win32 over the next 5-20 (maybe even longer) years. They want people to use their store and Microsoft is a company that has done tons of sketchy stuff in the past, including the super aggressive Windows 10 updating that just happened recently...

Some of the posts in here calling him crazy kind of scare me honestly.
 
All the people who are calling this crazy are too young to remember before Microsoft pushed out most of the competition in the OS market and then so many other markets after that.
Any one remember Netscape Navigator? You probably couldn't be reading this forum without the contributions they made to the web and they are gone now because of Internet Explorer's monopoly. (United States v. Microsoft Corp.)
It could happen again to Valve. This is precisely reason Valve is pushing their games and other publishers to support Linux/SteamOS. The sooner gaming can ditch Windows and DirectX the better.

In short Gaben is LITERALLY PC gaming's messiah. OpenGL forever!

Back then the internet was on it's first legs. These days anything you do is posted all over by click bait sites to the point where everyone knows. So there's much more awareness and limitations to what you can get away with. Not sure if MS can pull it off especially on something like steam. I do think they'll go ahead and try it anyways but it's too early to get a clear view. I'm sure the august 2nd update might give us more insight
 

MarionCB

Member
It was concerns over this type of stuff when Win 8 released (the Windows Store and how it could be locked down) that lead Valve to create and push Steam OS in the first place. It is such an obvious move for MS to do given that it is how they have consistently behaved throughout their history, and it would be so lucrative for them if they succeed. Valve had to do something to counter it. A shame it doesn't seem to have paid off too well.

I'm not saying MS will succeed or they won't back off, I'm only surprised at the mocking reaction of this thread given Microsoft's consistent MO in this.
 

Cipherr

Member
How can MS convince everyone to choose an inferior alternative, if Win32 is as good as he says it is, then developers won't care to choose UWA.

So naive.... There's people damn near preparing to buy the next iPhone which won't have a headphone jack, in exchange for an inferior or more expensive and unnecessary replacement.

The superior product does NOT always win. And companies in powerful positions can absolutely force inferior alternatives if they execute the move properly. Its hilarious how quickly people forget this stuff. Like, are folks just young and don't remember IE and the other stuff that gobbled up usershare despite being hilariously inferior due to heavy handed force feeding or what?

MAYBE he is wrong, but this wouldn't be the first time. And pretending its not possible is ridiculous.
 

Big_Al

Unconfirmed Member
I'm shocked at the reactions in this thread. Tim Sweeny is one of the smartest guys in the industry. Microsoft have tried this many times before (sometimes they got caught and failed). They may not be doing it, they may decide the PR is not worth it, but they've been refusing to deny doing it and talking around the issue which itself should be worrying enough.

This is GAF, there are some naive people here.

I'd believe Tim Sweeney over Microsoft any bloody day and I could easily, easily see Microsoft trying this shit with their history. And you can fuck right off with that 'Good guy Phil Spencer' shit. He's just another MS executive and you'd do best to not believe a thing he says or to at least not take things at face value, he's not your 'friend' and he's not doing things because he 'likes you' He's doing it because his puppet masters above are telling him too. Phil's just another corporate cog in the machine. Is that cynical thinking ? Absolutely but when it comes to corporations and Microsoft it's best to always keep an eye on them. But then MS is generally good at fucking things up anyway.
 
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