Personally, I can play a Windows game purchased on Steam on Linux/MacOS using Wine (This is how I currently play Age of Empires II). You can't say the same about a Windows Store game.

There is a stigma in the PC gamer community against Microsoft, especially after Games for Windows. "Steam or go home" sentiments also aren't all that uncommon. As for the accounts - I really don't know anyone who actually uses the MS store (whereas pretty much everyone who plays video games has a Steam account), and I interact with plenty of end-users daily. Maybe it just happens that the area I live in never adopted it, but I would still say that Steam is the better platform to try to get exposure on.

Trading one monopoly for another, I guess.

A thus far benevolent monopoly who have indicated positive intent and applicable thought patterns (i.e. the whole piracy is service problem).

They could release it on origin...

Joke aside, i assume a month later they will release on steam. The red number sirens and the fear of pirates have convinced a lot of sailors to rock the boat.

Can you login to the store without linking your entire computer to that email?

yes, but it's still a bad store :(

Games stores (for better or worse) are expected to have an ecosystem of services of varying importance:

- Friends list

- Text & Audio chat

- Cloud saves

- Automatic updates

- DLC installation

- Sales and Discounts

- Curation, suggestions, and browsing

- Achievements

The Microsoft Store has most of those, more or less, but the experience is not ideal.

The social services are tied into the Xbox app which works okay, but is quite complicated and Microsofty. Also PC gamers might not have their friends on Xbox or maybe it has their CoD friends, not their AoE friends, etc.

The MS store is not purpose-built for games, so it makes it a poor place to buy them. It's hard to find "real games" on there because you have to sift through mobile games, photoshop, movies, and Xbox controllers. Many PC stores make a big deal about sales with purpose-built home pages, best seller lists, weekly sales, event sales, newsletters, etc. The MS store does not have sales often and if they do you're not likely to hear about them. PC stores put a lot of effort into discoverability. There's personalized home pages, followed curators, recommendations from friends, and detailed search systems with a multitude of tags and sorting options. You can search for a recently released co-op action-rpg with steam controller support and sort by recent review sentiment. The MS store, by comparison, is a mobile app store on a computer.

PC Game stores are expected to have fast and reliable downloads. Steam can consistently download faster than my hard drive can write, and can reliably resume interrupted downloads. Steam can validate the integrity of game files and re-download them if necessary. Other clients seem to do fine as well. Download speeds from the MS store are reportedly inconsistent, and it has (or had) no ability to resume interrupted downloads. For weeks after the ~100GB Gears 4 was released exclusively on the MS store, /r/pcgaming was full of people complaining that the download was interrupted at 95GB and had to start over from 0.

All of these problems are solvable. I believe the download issues have been fixed. The store is already the best place to buy "Play Anywhere" titles if you have an Xbox, simply because you get it on both platforms. But MS has a long way to go to make the store pleasant to use and to win back PC gamers' sentiment.

One practically unsolvable problem is that the store doesn't exist on Linux, macOS, or Win 7, which matters to some portion of games and some portion of gamers.

Literally never used the MS Store

I even go so far as to block all requests to MS Store (via winstore.app.exe) with NetLimiter. I also block outlookcommunications, microsoft.photos.exe and video.ui.exe, all of which I never use but they keep wanting to call home every few days).

Why do you stay with a system whose developer has proven to act against your interest?

What's the alternative? And before you offer some obvious answer, remember that we're in the context of a Windows-only game :)

Gaming for Windows Live died. Let it stay dead.