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Microsoft aims to unify PC and Xbox One platforms

by Sia
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Microsoft’s gaming division is making a huge change to its current Xbox platform as, according to The Guardian, they are planning to unify its PC and Xbox One gaming platforms into one ecosystem running Universal Windows Applications (UWAs)

During a press event in San Francisco, head of Microsoft’s Xbox division Phil Spencer said that the Universal Windows Platform would be central to the company’s gaming strategy. He explained that this is the culmination of the company’s vision over the past year.

“In other [consumer technology] ecosystems you get more continuous innovation in hardware that you rarely see in consoles because consoles lock the hardware and software platforms together at the beginning and they ride the generation out for seven years or so. We’re allowing ourselves to decouple our software platform from the hardware platform on which it runs,” says Spencer. 

Simply put, Spencer is saying that the future Xboxes may no longer be a console with fixed hardware. It is possible that Microsoft may be releasing updated versions of the Xbox console at regular intervals with more powerful processors and graphics hardware. Thanks to the fact that games will be written as UWAs, older titles will remain compatible with the new machine. Of course, whether or not gamers would embrace this yearly update format for their consoles is an entirely different question.

The first game that will be employing this UWA concept is Forza Motorsport Apex. Microsoft has employed an in-house team, Turn 10 Studios, to convert its Forza Motorsports engine to the UPW format. “The Forza Tech engine is now DirectX 12 and UWP so Apex is just the start of that. It was something we had to do for technology reasons, but it was also something we wanted to do to make the platforms better. We wanted to make UWP and DX 10 better for everybody,” says Dan Greenawalt, creative director at Turn 10.

Perhaps the more interesting question is how third party developers would react to Microsoft’s new gaming philosophy. Veteran game developer Byron Atkinson-Jones, who owns his own indie studio Xiotex, believes that while UWA sounds like a good idea in principle, it is reliant on just how hard it is to develop for and how much of a closed ecosystem it may become. “The best thing about PC is that anyone can make a game for it and UWA sounds like it’s going to become a curated system that will probably require some developer registration to get on,” says Atkinson-Jones. However, according to a Microsoft spokesperson, any developer can create UWP games using tools available on Microsoft’s Developer Network page. Developers would currenly have to register to sell through the Windows Store and follow the store guidelines to make their app available, but besides that, there is no approval process to obtain development tools or develop UWP apps.

Another issue that may pop out for the yearly iterations of Xbox-es is its hardware specifications. “As it stands currently, if you are making an Xbox One game, you can be sure on what kind of hardware it’s running. If developers are then forced down a UWA route, is it going to be the case that this certainty is gone and we get back to the situation on PC where you have to start specifying a minimum spec – which kinds of renders a unified platform redundant?” adds Atkinson-Jones.

Whatever the case, the future of Xbox seems to be taking a dramatic shift from the standard console ecosystem into an entirely Windows-centric one. Let’s just hope that Microsoft does not make this into another Games for Windows Live.

Source: The Guardian

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