It may not come as a surprise, but I am currently interning @ Microsoft (Netherlands), doing research into the Windows Store vs the competition (Play Store, Apple App Store) to find out where the opportunities for developers/marketeers/entrepreneur in the Windows Store lie. I've got some interesting numbers, there are more opportunities than one might think.

I agree Windows is an interesting target. Best thing is to target multiple platforms at the same time though. Many people might think this is a lot of work, but I don't think this is necessarily true.

I've recently began rewriting our framework to Mono / C# and so far it's been a good experience. From what I've read I should be able to have at least 50% shared code across platforms, but some type of apps can perform even better. Games written with MonoGame (open-source version of Microsoft's XNA framework) might be able to share over 90% of the code between iOS / Android / Windows Phone apps. Also the Ubuntu phone will be a possible target in the coming year.

So yeah, I agree Windows is an interesting target, but you don't want to miss out on the other markets. Mono is the best solution to have a performant app for most platforms while at the same time offering a native UI experience.

I used MonoGame for Adlib and Petunk. For Windows 8 and Windows 7 the games share almost all of their code. I would estimate 90%. The only differences are persistence, sharing, that sort of thing. That said, it gets trickier when you want to create complex user interfaces or support different resolutions. In fact for my latest game I've switched to XAML completely due to those problems.

The most important thing, in my opinion, is to follow the MVC or MVVM (my preference) pattern and keep all of your game logic in a portable class library. This will give you the flexibility to target new platforms relatively quickly in my experience.

I've made a number of solutions to common problems I ran into which run on Windows 8 and 7 (and potentially other platforms) available if you're interested. Check it out here:

https://bitbucket.org/spottedzebra/pasta

Here's a freebie: fix sort by rating. Currently the Windows store does a simple average. This means all apps with a single self-awarded five star rating dominate the rankings.

Interesting - can any statistician point to the "proper" way to weight such rankings?

This post describes an approach:

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

and this little page demonstrates an adaptation to a 5-star rating system:

http://www.goproblems.com/test/wilson/wilson.php?v1=0&v2...

Randall Munroe gave a user-oriented explanation of the system here:

http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...

Sorry, my previous post may not be clear. I'm doing research into the store as in 'the available apps in the store, what kind of apps are popular, etc.', not the store itself :)

This pretty much confirms my hypothesis that Microsoft employees just don't use and/or care about their own products.

The product is undeniably broken, and you work on that product? Aren't you at all concerned about having the problem fixed, even if it is not directly under your control?

Wait, what? That is one very strange conclusion. I didn't apply for a programming internship at Microsoft, it's a market research internship. I don't even have access to the team that developed the Windows Store... So no, I don't work on that product.

These PCs and laptops are the very same machines that "apps" users are deciding they just don't need any more. Full desktop applications for Windows aren't going to go away, but as I see it they're not going to be ported to "So modern we can't agree a sensible consumer-facing name for it" rapidly, either.

I agree that it's a good place to be selling right now, as the competition is sparse and largely terrible. There are a lot of holes waiting to be filled. I don't think it's going to grow the way you seem to be predicting.

Computers are different now.

Windows Store apps don't just run on PCs, they also run on tablets (and with a few small modifications on Windows Phones).