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What Microsoft are doing is limiting what customers can play on the customer's own hardware by locking vendors into exclusively using Microsoft technologies to develop games. For a flawed analogy, imagine a company other than Sony limiting what games could be developed for the PS2.


How is Microsoft forcing someone not to develop games for Linux or Mac? How is Microsoft stopping you from playing Linux games on that same PC?

I yet have to hear that explanation.

Edited 2007-11-20 04:27

As I heard it told, when Silicon Graphics virtually collapsed, Microsoft took the opportunity and bought some opengl patents and at the same time they bought all suppliers of opengl graphics drivers for Windows.

Microsoft then made it so that the only way to have an opengl application on Windows was to go via Microsoft's opengl driver. In directx10, Microsoft nobbled opengl. Now all opengl calls on Windows are forced to go via a translation layer to directx.

The performance of opengl on Windows was ruined. Whereas before game developers could write their game to use opengl, and as a result have a game that was readily portable to other platforms, now the performance hit on opengl on Windows is just too high, and all games effectively must be written to use directx and not opengl.

Hence, all PC games are now Windows-only, whereas before they could have been written to be cross-platform, if the game developer so chose.

Microsoft did an "embrace and extinguish" for opengl software on Windows. They didn't even bother with the "extend" phase for this one.

http://www.mcadonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id...
"The second way to currently utilize OpenGL on Vista is to use Microsoft’s own OpenGL implementation, which is layered on top of the DirectX driver. However, according to Metro, an administrator on OpenGL.org’s discussion forum, there are major implications with running OpenGL applications in this way. “In practice this means OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced - perhaps as much as 50%, OpenGL on Windows will be fixed at a vanilla version of OpenGL 1.4, and no extensions will be possible to expose future hardware innovations.”

Edited 2007-11-20 05:19

I dunno, perhaps it's the same way they force major computer manufacturers to only ship their computers with Windows? Perhaps it's the same way they tried to get Intel and AMD to manufacture specific CPUs so that only Windows would be able to operate on them? Perhaps it's also similar to the way Microsoft force their own software on their own customers. Maybe it's similar to the way Microsoft have always had this monopolistic lock-in style business practice.

It would not surprise me one bit to discover that this same tactic is used with major software development companies, including the gaming industry. Microsoft provide or subsidise the development tools and documentation and all they ask for in return is a itty bitty promise to make software operate on Windows only.