News Windows 10 to get cross-buy support

Along with requiring developers to make a choice between simplifying, dumbing down, or other kind's of sacrifices so their software can appeal to a larger market.

Are we going to see more software developed to run on the lowest common denominator ?

 

Yup. I don't know why anyone thought that might ever change.

AAA titles tend sell best on consoles, thus they're going to be the primary development platform.

 

Well of course, there are better games on PC that they don't have to compete with, of course they sell better on consoles.

 

TBH i was thinking more along the lines of developers targeting software in general towards the biggest market, at a guess wouldn't that be phones, granted that's not Microsoft's biggest market (yet) but if you're going to write code why not follow what Microsoft are preaching and do it once, then ship that code to a company that specialises in porting to the other platform.

It almost seems like Microsoft are about to shoot themselves in the foot with the whole universal apps idea, aren't developers going to write code that runs on as many Microsoft devices as possible such as phones upwards, if they do that why not just write code for the largest market in the first place, i.e Android or Apple phones.

Maybe I'm just rambling but it seems they're almost encouraging developers and customers to ignore the advantage that's afford by better hardware, their USP.

/verbal diarrhea

 

Well, Windows OS on PCs still has a huge chunk of market share, so it may be that developers primarily write for that, with resizing to smaller devices as a secondary consideration. It's easier to downsize than upsize...

 

The idea is not that you have the same user interface across all devices - the UI for a phone barely works on a tablet yet alone a desktop or console but you can write all the application logic and stuff that does stuff in a form that would work across all of those devices. You can then write different UI for your phone, tablet etc

 

Much easier to not change size at all, then again all this are just my idle musings (slow day).

The thing i can't get out of my head is that Microsoft made a game console not because it was their biggest market, that's Windows after all, that resulted in developers writing not for Microsoft's largest market but their own largest market, with Game dev's that's targeting consoles, for phones/tablets that's Android/iOS.

Isn't the same thing going to happen again ? Why as a hypothetical developer would i write code to take advantage of Windows when that may not be my largest market.

Still leave the problem of what to do with features that work on one device better than another, if I'm not mistaken Microsoft have a version of word that's intended for touch because some features don't crossover very well, are developers going to bother doing something like that or are they just going to cut any extra features.

 

So will cross-buy mean the end of the console ...and PC, for the matter... exclusive?

 

I'm sorry, what?

BF4 - Sold better on consoles than PC. Started life on PC.
CoD - Sells better on consoles than PC. Started life on PC.

See umpteen other examples I can't be arsed to research right now.

Oh, and pretty much all AAA titles get multi-platform releases and still sell better on console. The console market is evidently larger.

Of course it's going to become par for the course to develop for consoles over PC's.

 

I'm leaning over a glass of house red in a small Italian restaurant after a long day on a workshop in London, so don't expect any sensible or coherent comment from me.

 

So business as usual then.

For game developers it is, but the Windows market outnumbers consoles by over 10 to 1 (conservative estimate).

 

Well, sure, you can hardly run a business on an Xbox One

But cross-platform apps, they're going to be games generally. I dread to think about using Excel on an Xbox controller!

 

FTFY

 

And FTFY.
You quoted the wrong person.

On the subject, I enjoy using Excel for some strange reason.

 

I am also coming around to the ways of Excel..

I mean, it's not as bad as Access!

 

Oh yeah?... Oh yeah? Well... you smell!