It may become more difficult (or just less convenient) for the consumer to select software that falls outside of the "Windows App Store" (whatever it may be termed).
This type of distribution model (Steam being another example) would be counter to Blizzard's apparent philosophy on the matter.
So I don't know that "Windows 8", the operating system, is bad for Blizzard. But maybe "Windows 8", the direction, is.
Again, 100% speculation. No necessary basis in fact, just ideas bounced around.
That's the impression I get from both Apple and Microsoft's recent OS/App Store directions.
A few years from now the apologists for each will be saying "Well hardly anyone but super techies ever used those options to disable verification anyway, so I understand why they turned them off".
No, because that would be fantastically stupid of them and none of them are stupid. Not even Microsoft--I mean, I think the Metro slop is a joke, but no, they're not stupid enough to do that. What you are peddling doesn't even make sense because precisely what the fearmongerers (see, this goes both ways, think about that next time you call me an "apologist") because it is fairly unlikely that anyone is ever going to be writing native applications from an iPad so it really does follow that they need a mostly-unencumbered environment from which to make the software that makes the whirly buy-the-iPad-buy-the-apps wheel go around.
Which, as it happens, is what Apple has said for quite a while that they're doing: iOS is the daily-driver car and OS X is the do-work truck. Which, though I don't use iOS myself anymore, is a completely reasonable division of labor for the majority of computing tasks.
"The belief in the development community is that Microsoft will make Windows 8 a closed system, an operating system that seeks to more stringently control, much in the way that Apple does with Mac OS X and the iOS platform. This would allow Microsoft to better monitor the quality of applications running on its platform, but it will also wall off the most widely used operating system in the world from myriad developers. PC game makers use Windows because of the openness of the platform and its ubiquity. If Microsoft takes that openness away, what will developers do?"
Ref http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/blizzard-agrees-with-...
Can someone explain why? Can't a game be run in full-screen mode anymore? Would there be technical issues during the installation of the game? Privileges issues? No more Direct X?