I remember reading a while back that Tim Sweeny thinks that Microsoft will slowly degrade the performance of Steam games to force people on to games purchased from the Microsoft store:
Now I hear that Microsoft is introducing new features into Windows 10 Game Mode that promise to improve games performance by tweaking things to optimize windows for games while they are in the foreground. According to Microsoft, it will improve things for both Win-32 games as well as UWP games, but the biggest improvements will only be available to UWP games.
It would seem that Tim Sweeny might have been right, in a way... thoughts?
I don't think so. Steam already has a good 'head of steam' with the content distribution. MS has failed at this over and over.
Whatever performance improvements 'Game Mode' offers will be well documented enough that others can implement them.
The one thing they could do to sour the milk for steam would be to actively reduce performance, but they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. However, they've done stuff like that before so I don't put it past them. But I think it'd ultimately be to the detriment of the Windows platform; it'd make Linux/SteamOS look better by comparison.
One of main advantages of the windows platform was its openness within a win32 and HAL software architecture. And due to the wide spread usage of that openness it will be hard to do something radical for MS. Situation might change over time and MS might try some movements here and there (as they did with releases of recent games - that actually have done only problems for them if only by just making the only customers that trusted them very unhappy) but it will be eventually corrected (as it was - mainly refunds for game bought on the Windows Store).
For now. I think that Steam it self is the biggest issue for it self. Within last few months (whole 2016 - will be probably more precise) I've seen flood of games on that platform. I would be the last person to say that more product in store is a bad thing. But the main problem for me is that 99% of games that steams tries to sell me ,are those that I would never buy (because some of them do not interest me, but there are also those that are simply very very bad). The main problem is that steam is not just trying to sell them, it is throwing them at you, behaving like annoying door to door seller that knows that have shitty product and does everything to sell it too you.
Currently I'm looking at Origin, GOG, or maybe even Uplay as a better shops and Steam becomes more and more like a obscure market place where everyone would sell everything just for some small buck (and unprepared guests could wake up in hospital without the kidney).
Few weeks ago I started to watch Jim Sterling channel. After few uploads about steam green light, and early access, I started to questioning his review subject choices but then I tried to look to buy something for holidays (and I saw how much Steam is trying to throw shit at me) and then I understood.
It will affect win 32 binaries and UWP so steam games will be affected as they run as win32.
Though on to the main Topic of things. It is too early to tell what Game Mode will be. It doesn't do much for my system as it is. But could include features in the future that are more aggressive about shutting off services.
I don't think game mode will ever evolve past sutting down services that are not MS...
Unless it builds a partner program that they work with to register there program as non game related which would be an odd one at that.
I hear ya. The insane crap-flood on Steam is not a good thing. You don't have to look hard to find games with straight up stolen assets or blatant asset flips. Steam doesn't do any checks, it seems they want US to do it for them. It is kinda deplorable.
I think Game Mode helps Steam if anything. Windows Store is not very attractive for anyone really.
While both are affected, UWP will see a bigger performance improvement. What concerns me is that this disparity may grow greater over time as this feature is expanded upon over time.
Actually yes, and we not only agreed with that but fought to get it, that's the weird thing.
Greenlight was set up as a user regulated way to get on steam. In early interviews Gabe straight up says that it is meant so Valve staff don't have to spend all day policing the store and calling what goes on and what does not. It also makes it so one person in a office is not the sole judge of what is wanted and suitable for sale. Now they don't have to pay employees to waste time and the community call want goes up.
Unfortunately handing over voting powers to a near anonymous group on the internet never ends perfectly so as a by product we have piles of crap on steam.
That's a bit harsh, don't you think? With a door to door seller they can ring your door bell all day long until you answer the door, annoying the shit out of everyone inside until you act. Steam on the other hand is very passive outside of the specials that popout into a new window now and again.
You might be right in my bad analogy choice. But that popup is not the issue. The flood of unsorted, unverified, unfiltered games is the issue. In the past I would, from time to time, browse for 10 min the steam - now I would never do that. It seems that everyone is contributing to that bad situation. Bad developers that sue for negative review, negative review given by gamer because game do not work on his ZX spectrum, positive review given by family member of the developer, and steam recommending me that game because I had once bought (4 years ago) a casual game.
In my opinion there is is too much noise in all of it - thus my analogy to door to door seller.
Something that I would be very against in the past, like have to install Origin to play the game, now is becoming more and more welcome, because of the store content/noise ratio. Soon(TM) I might start to first check if game is on Origin/GOG, and then go to Steam only when it is not found on those.
I get the noise aspect and steam recommending trash games that are tangentially related to past purchases.
Regarding the noise, you might want to configure your recommendations to leave out indie games. Should help a lot since it's the indies that are slinging their games onto Steam en force. To this day I still have not installed Origin or Uplay on my machine. GoG is the only other digital dist. I would consider but usually I just download them directly so I don't have all that overhead.
I guess I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft was known for "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". They've had a bad history or slowly corrupting the competition on their platform until it was a complete mess, while Microsofts own products continued to shine. I wouldn't be so suspicious if they didn't have a history of this behavior in the past.
There is more than an overt push by Microsoft to switch development to UWP, the Microsoft Hololens uses UWP for it's development platform. I could even see them eventually only supporting new versions of DirectX for UWP thus cutting off from desktop supported games. They would probably still allow older DirectX games to work on the desktop traditionally but new features would only be implemented for the UWP platform thus new game development would be forced into using UWP.
I also could see that, although I'm not sure that would be the best move for Microsoft, seeing as how well Vulcan appears to perform. Such a move might help nudge the games industry away from dependence on Microsoft and allow for more parity on Linux for gaming.