Re:Epic Games founder says Microsoft's patches will make Ste...
by ewzimm on Wednesday July 27, 2016 @12:37PM
(#12174267)
What I'm responding to is "if one day Microsoft decides to phase out... right now the only official way..." If they ever decide to phase it out, it won't matter what support UWP had mid-2016, it will matter what support it has when the phase out happens. Also, it's officially sanctioned right now to sideload downloaded programs not installed from the Microsoft store. Microsoft has publicly promised never to close the platform, and they aren't so powerful that they can afford to go against their development community like that. There's nothing at all indicating that Microsoft is going to shut out competing app stores and sideloading. The only evidence is that some people feel that Microsoft wants to do that.
> "The risk here is that, if Microsoft convinces everybody to use UWP, then they phase out Win32 apps. If they can succeed in doing that then it’s a small leap to forcing all apps and games to be distributed through the Windows Store. Once we reach that point, the PC has become a closed platform. It won’t be that one day they flip a switch that will break your Steam library – what they’re trying to do is a series of sneaky manoeuvres. They make it more and more inconvenient to use the old apps, and, simultaneously, they try to become the only source for the new ones."