This is How Windows Evolved As An Open Storefront Vs Mobile

Xbox head Phil Spencer had interesting things to say about how Microsoft’s Windows has evolved through the times as an open storefront, in comparison to mobile.

In summary, Phil explains that Microsoft’s operating system was an open platform from the start, meaning anyone can make any programs for it and publish it for consumers to use. He points out other companies have opened their own storefronts for their games, which includes not only Valve’s Steam marketplace for multiple games, but also platforms where the game itself sells ancillary products, such as Riot Games’ League of Legends client.

Phil brings up Microsoft’s own online app store, and plainly states that they can just do both. What Phil and Microsoft values here, is the ability of creators and vendors to build their own markets, and determine how they sell and deliver their own products.

Now Phil neglects to bring something up in this discussion. That something would be Microsoft’s own attempt to close elements of their Windows platform, called Games for Windows Live.

Games For Windows Live was part of the Live Anywhere program. This would have unified the Xbox Live service across multiple Microsoft platforms, including Windows’ desktop OSes, Windows’ mobile OSes, and Zune.

Games For Windows Live allowed Xbox users to bring over their gamertags and accounts to Windows, and play online using the same Xbox servers. However, this platform turned out to be a dud. On the developer side, they added an extra layer of complexity that made making the games harder. On the user side, consumers found the software buggy, and it was particularly odious how the software functionally acted as DRM for many games, and became difficult to remove for those games, even for the developers themselves.

Microsoft continued to struggle with how to approach gaming on their own platform for years after this dud as well. The Microsoft App Store, and the UWP format, where also similarly derided as ideas out of touch with consumers, and would not be adopted by the public.

The company’s modern approach is simpler for consumers to understand, and has a more immediate appeal. While the Windows store continues to exist as a minor storefront for digital games on the operating system, it is really Game Pass that has taken off as most Windows’ users preferred delivery method from Microsoft themselves.

Microsoft may no longer be able to catch up to Steam or Epic Games on building their own PC gaming platform, but since they shifted gears to building new services, the company has seen considerably more success to gaming on PC.

And this shift may very well be what Apple and Google will have to learn to do as well, when the markets finally shift over the EU’s Digital Markets act, mandating them to allow third party stores and sideloading on their devices.

You can read Phil’s full statement below:

“I look at how Windows has evolved. And Windows is a large scale platform with over a billion users. And anybody can create a storefront on a Windows PC.

If you’re a creator, and you wanna go directly to your customer, you are able to create a single storefront that might just carry your own content. And so you do all of the closing and carrying costs and cogs. If you wanna use a third party store, such as Valve’s Steam, the Epic Games Store, you are able to use those.

And you can do both. You can have your own store and it goes directly to customers. You can have third party stores, a multitude of third party stores that can compete on price, service, and features.

And obviously, there’s also a Windows store, a store built into the windows operating system. So it’s not to preclude first party platform holders from building a store. And it shouldn’t be to the exclusion of anybody else creating a storefront.

And I watch how Windows has evolved. Where you have large publishers like Riot Games, who go directly to their customers on a game called League of Legends. And they’re able to do most of their business on the PC directly with their customers through their own store.

And you see the rise of things like Valve’s Steam, which is a massive storefront for third parties. And you have smaller storefronts that might serve a specific part of the market.

I think that open storefront capability on a device that is the scale of mobile, would be critically critically important to opening up diversity of competition around service costs and discovery, on the world’s largest gaming platform, which are the phones of the world.”

Source: Second Request Podcast