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OpenCL merging into Vulkan?

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tamz_msc said:
You have to rewrite your whole engine in order to support DX12 and all its standards. Developers would much rather keep making DX11 titles that have a better chance of reaching a wider audience instead of restricting themselves to one OS.
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Progress is unceasing, especially on the PC platform. If developers can't keep up with the technological trends, they will be out of business. Windows 7 was great "back in the day" but it's nearly 10 years old now, or even more if you count the development time. Also, developers always constantly update and rewrite their engines due to the console cycle anyway.

Why should PCs be any different?
 
tamz_msc said:
There are other issues with UWP, like limited modding capabilities, post-processing AA injection through reshade not working, user-made modifications that are absolutely necessary for a proper experience not working etc. Then there's the problem of updates and maintenance. Gears of War 4 got a huge update months after release.

Steamworks is Win32, and I don't see Valve porting it to UWP any time soon.
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Mods will eventually make their way to UWP, though they will be inhibited somewhat. There's benefits and drawbacks to using UWP, just like anything else. What you lose in flexibility and customization, you gain in security and dramatically reduced rates of piracy. I haven't heard of a single UWP game or application that has been pirated. It might happen eventually, but so far it seems like pirates are having a helluva time doing so.

Besides, I don't think Microsoft is hoping to directly compete against Steam when it comes to their UWP platform. It seems they are using it to promote their own first party games more than anything. Also, it's an easily accessible storefront for apps and other types of digital media like movies, music and e-books. That's the real purpose of UWP, to allow Microsoft to further draw the people that use their operating systems into their ecosystem.

Personally I'm all for it. PC gaming is bigger than just Steam, and there's no reason why Valve should have the entire pie to itself.
 
Carfax83 said:
Progress is unceasing, especially on the PC platform. If developers can't keep up with the technological trends, they will be out of business. Windows 7 was great "back in the day" but it's nearly 10 years old now, or even more if you count the development time. Also, developers always constantly update and rewrite their engines due to the console cycle anyway.

Why should PCs be any different?
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They will keep up no doubt, but UWP won't be adopted except by first-party developers, of which there are a miniscule amount.
 
Carfax83 said:
Mods will eventually make their way to UWP, though they will be inhibited somewhat. There's benefits and drawbacks to using UWP, just like anything else. What you lose in flexibility and customization, you gain in security and dramatically reduced rates of piracy. I haven't heard of a single UWP game or application that has been pirated. It might happen eventually, but so far it seems like pirates are having a helluva time doing so.

Besides, I don't think Microsoft is hoping to directly compete against Steam when it comes to their UWP platform. It seems they are using it to promote their own first party games more than anything. Also, it's an easily accessible storefront for apps and other types of digital media like movies, music and e-books. That's the real purpose of UWP, to allow Microsoft to further draw the people that use their operating systems into their ecosystem.

Personally I'm all for it. PC gaming is bigger than just Steam, and there's no reason why Valve should have the entire pie to itself.
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No developer hoping to earn the goodwill of its players is going to trade flexibility and customization in favor of security. Piracy will continue to happen, but as long as the game has a strong following among it's audience, it will be successful. It's not as if you need UWP to reach your sales targets with zero instances of piracy.

Regarding mods, look at the response from Fallout 4 modders when Bethesda offered approved mods for consoles. Many just shrugged it off. There were modders who simply announced that they won't port their mods to consoles. UWP restrictions would have a similar response.

Microsoft has negligible first party developers and keeps pushing sequels to long-running franchises that are over a decade old. Except Forza people aren't interested in yet another Gears of War or Halo with its numerous spinoffs. Of course with the developers of these games Microsoft can use UWP. Others aren't simply interested, Remedy's next game is going to be on PS4.

And let's not even talk about the functionality of Windows Store. It's fine for apps which are mobile or tablet-like, not for PC games.

Nobody I know buys non-EA games on Origin, or non-Ubisoft games on Uplay. It's even worse in the case of Windows Store.
 
tamz_msc said:
No developer hoping to earn the goodwill of its players is going to trade flexibility and customization in favor of security. Piracy will continue to happen, but as long as the game has a strong following among it's audience, it will be successful. It's not as if you need UWP to reach your sales targets with zero instances of piracy.

Regarding mods, look at the response from Fallout 4 modders when Bethesda offered approved mods for consoles. Many just shrugged it off. There were modders who simply announced that they won't port their mods to consoles. UWP restrictions would have a similar response.
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Figured I'd chime in. Bethesda's games are my poison.

On the subject of piracy, Skyrim was pirated to hell and back, yet the profits were several times more than the budget put into the game; it was Bethesda's most successful game ever. Then Fallout 4 came about, and the same thing happened. Extreme amounts of piracy, yet profits were the best Bethesda's ever seen.

Skyrim grossed 30 million sales in 2016, five years after release. 7 Million were sold on the first week.

Fallout 4? Bethesda sold 14 million to retailers within the first 24 hours of it's release. Taking VGChartz's stats for PS4 & Xbox sales, with Steamspy's for Windows, we're at 16.4 million sales a year and a half after release.

Piracy isn't an issue if the game has worth. It's an issue if the developers made a bad game.


As for mods, yeah, the console modding scene is an afterthought. For Xbox, there is no script extender, which is what all the cool mods use. For PS4, you can't use new assets. If the mod requires files other an the .esp (pre-baked NPC face maps, editing batched objects, scripts, sounds, animations, etc.), Sony won't allow it.

Modding requires an open platform to be successful. Bethesda on Windows hasn't got a properly open one, as it's an absolute nightmare to create animations, and there's a bunch of hard-coded stuff. But it's far and away better than what the consoles have.
 
tamz_msc said:
No developer hoping to earn the goodwill of its players is going to trade flexibility and customization in favor of security
Click to expand...

I could say the same thing about mods. There are plenty of games that don't have any modding capabilities yet are still very successful and have lots of goodwill. Doom comes to mind, and so does any game that runs on the Frostbite 3 engine like the BF series. So modding is not only made possible because of the platform, but the engine as well.

Many games will always be closed to modding, or have extremely limited mod support because the engine and or the middleware do not allow for it.

Microsoft has negligible first party developers and keeps pushing sequels to long-running franchises that are over a decade old. Except Forza people aren't interested in yet another Gears of War or Halo with its numerous spinoffs. Of course with the developers of these games Microsoft can use UWP. Others aren't simply interested, Remedy's next game is going to be on PS4.
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I agree that Microsoft has a first party problem, and they are aware of it. This year, the Xbox exclusives will be State of Decay 2, Sea of Thieves, Crackdown 3 and Cuphead. They really need a Fable 4. But the point is, these games will ONLY be available on the Windows store for those that want to buy it, much like Gears of War 4 and Forza 3.

Like I said earlier, the entire point of UWP/Windows store is to draw people into the Microsoft ecosystem. Exclusive games which are only available on the UWP platform and nowhere else makes for a compelling reason to buy these games directly from Microsoft for those that want them.
 
Carfax83 said:
I could say the same thing about mods. There are plenty of games that don't have any modding capabilities yet are still very successful and have lots of goodwill. Doom comes to mind, and so does any game that runs on the Frostbite 3 engine like the BF series.
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Dragon Age Inquisition runs on Frostbite 3 and it has a pretty healthy modding scene. No deep changes to environments or game mechanics, but it still has quite a bit of stuff that you can change.
 
Excessi0n said:
Dragon Age Inquisition runs on Frostbite 3 and it has a pretty healthy modding scene. No deep changes to environments or game mechanics, but it still has quite a bit of stuff that you can change.
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Just took a look at them over at Nexus mods and it seems that the vast majority of them are aesthetic tweaks. So while you're right, I'm pretty sure nobody buys DAI for its modding capabilities. Anyway, my point was that there are plenty of games out there with no, or very minimal modding and they are still quite successful. Games that have very robust modding capabilities seem to be an exception more than anything.

With the prevalence of middleware, developers are reluctant to open up their games for fear of exposing the code of other companies.
 
Carfax83 said:
I could say the same thing about mods. There are plenty of games that don't have any modding capabilities yet are still very successful and have lots of goodwill. Doom comes to mind, and so does any game that runs on the Frostbite 3 engine like the BF series. So modding is not only made possible because of the platform, but the engine as well.

Many games will always be closed to modding, or have extremely limited mod support because the engine and or the middleware do not allow for it.
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Mods are secondary to the question about overall flexibility. Would something like DSfix work if Dark Souls was a UWP game? By the way, Steam has its Workshop, what does UWP have?

And let's not talk about Frostbite. Mass Effect Andromeda is a failure by EA sales standards, BF1 is bleeding player counts, Bioware's future projects are on hold and EA made much more revenue from Origin Access than game sales on Origin. The WW1 novelty of BF1 is about the same as the story mode in FIFA 17. It has become similar to the sports franchises under EA's umbrella.

Contrast BF1 with R6 Siege, every time it had a free weekend on Steam it increased its player count. Would it have been possible if it were Uplay only?
I agree that Microsoft has a first party problem, and they are aware of it. This year, the Xbox exclusives will be State of Decay 2, Sea of Thieves, Crackdown 3 and Cuphead. They really need a Fable 4. But the point is, these games will ONLY be available on the Windows store for those that want to buy it, much like Gears of War 4 and Forza 3.

Like I said earlier, the entire point of UWP/Windows store is to draw people into the Microsoft ecosystem. Exclusive games which are only available on the UWP platform and nowhere else makes for a compelling reason to buy these games directly from Microsoft for those that want them.
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Except that hardly anyone is interested in Microsoft exclusives. I know more people who bought the Switch from the grey market to play BOTW than those who are waiting for the games you mentioned. Hell, I even know people who played all their life on PC only, on rigs with GTX 1070s and above who bought the PS4 because of what Sony has to offer.

Microsoft's exclusives doesn't even command the levels of desirability that Sony or Nintendo commands, and Windows Store and UWP does not help its cause.
 
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