Neil Hughes
Rob Pardo, Blizzard's executive vice president of game design, posted a comment on Twitter this week, highlighted by CVG, in which he said Windows 8 is "not awesome" for his company. Pardo's take was offered in agreement with Valve founder Gabe Newell, who made headlines this week when he predicted Windows 8 will be a "catastrophe."
Both Blizzard and Valve are in unique positions in the gaming world, as each developer offers customers the ability to directly purchase their titles over the Internet. Valve's Steam is a a full game store with its own titles and games from other publishers, while Blizzard's Battle.net offers paid downloads of its own titles, including "Diablo III" and monthly subscriptions to the massively multiplayer online game "World of Warcraft."
Microsoft will be making its own major push in the digital storefront space with the launch of Windows 8. The Windows 8 Store will allow developers to sell their applications, which can be priced from $1.49 to $999.99 and will come with free seven-day trial periods.
Both Valve and Blizzard develop games for Apple's OS X platform, as well as Microsoft's Windows. Neither company, however, sells their titles on Apple's Mac App Store.
Blizzard's "Diablo III" launched on Mac earlier this year.
Both developers now release new game titles on the same day for both Mac and PC. Last year Valve debuted "Portal 2" on the Mac and this year Blizzard launched "Diablo III," while Valve will bring "Counter-Strike: Global Offensive" to OS X on Aug. 21, and Blizzard announced this week that the new "World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria" expansion will come to the Mac on Sept. 25.
Valve plans to hedge its bets by developing games for Linux as well as Windows and Mac. Newell said this week he thinks some of the top-tier PC makers will exit the market because "margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people."
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56 Comments
Windows 8: Not for the horde!!!
Wow, that's quite a prediction. Practically overnight some 40+% of the computer operating system market is going to shift to Linux so they can play Blizzard and Valve games!
Good luck with that business plan, Pardo.
Eh. Functionally, Windows 8 is fine, and even has some nice new features versus 7. It's also been very stable right from the get go, so no complaints there. Metro is the real issue here, and MS needs to realize that what is probably good for a touch interface is cumbersome shit with a mouse and keyboard. I understand they are going for cross platform parity and functionality, much like Apple with their Mountain Lion and iOS 6, but I have the sneaking suspicion that Service Pack 1 will allow users to ditch Metro in favor of the classic Start Button layout they are familiar and comfortable with.
I won't be upgrading this cycle, because 7 is doing great for me right now, and the new functionality of 8 isn't worth even the reduced price to upgrade.
All this being said, however, I'd hardly call 8 a potential catastrophe. It might not be a record breaker like 7, but it's far from the complete disaster hat was Me. Apple survived Lion, MS survived Vista, and so it will Windows 8.
Yeah, what isn't clear from either of these statements is exactly what is it about Windows 8 that's such a disaster? I mean maybe Metro sucks, but what's that got to do with gaming..?
From what I can see, nothing in particular will change from Blizzard and Valve's points of view...
What am I missing here?
I agree with you completely. I've always thought, as have most people in the industry, that MS should just ditch Metro all together for Win8. Opposite is true for WinRT. Why the freak can you get to the Win 8 desktop in RT? That's just stupid. They can have similar underpinnings, but they are two different platforms that cannot be shoved down everyone's throat. It's a mess.
BTW - Lion wasn't a mess, quite stable actually and not that much different than ML. I don't hear any body still b!tching about the natural/unnatural scrolling anymore. People just like to b!tch about something. They don't like change. Change is good, as long as it's executed well and for good reason. But MS's efforts is just change for change's sake.