Everything can be hacked, as a certain Overwatch character is fond of saying. That seems to be increasingly true of consumer electronics... including stuffed teddy bears and unicorns. According to security researcher Troy Hunt, a series of web-connected, app-enabled toys called CloudPets have been hacked. The manufacturer's central database was reportedly compromised over several months after stunningly poor security, despite the attempts of many researchers and journalists to inform the manufacturer of the potential danger. Several ransom notes were left, demanding Bitcoin payments for the implied deletion of stolen data.
[...]
Hunt and the researchers he collaborated with found that the central database for CloudPets' voice messages and user info was stored on a public-facing MongoDB server, with only basic hashes protecting user addresses and passwords. The same database apparently connected to the stored voice messages that could be retrieved by the apps and toys. Easy access and poor password requirements may have resulted in unauthorized access to a large number of accounts. The database was finally removed from the publicly accessible server in January, but not before demands for ransom were left. Hunt theorizes that manufacturer Spiral Toys, facing poor sales and disastrous stock performance, had neither the interest nor the manpower to do anything about the early warnings given by concerned users.
This is the big problem with the Internet Of Things: having every device you own quietly monitoring everything you do, and uploading all of that valuable data to the internet, but not securing it properly, basically invites black hat hackers to invade your privacy, steal your identity, threaten your family and your children, and/or blackmail you with intimate details of your life that you'd previously assumed were private. And securing every IoT device may be an essentially intractable problem, relying on a level of technological competence and due diligence by every company on earth that makes something with a microchip inside, something which we already know isn't happening.
I can understand why big corporations are keen to know absolutely every intimate detail of our persona lives, all the better to be able to predict and influence our purchases, but I'm not seeing any reason why average consumers should want to invite this Gordian know of privacy problems into their lives. There's no value proposition, here; I get little to no benefit, and give up way too much, all to enrich large corporations who really need no further enriching at my expense. Until they figure out how to make this a benefit to me, and make it reliably safe for me, you can count me out.
Blocking "side-loading," as normal program installation is now know, was something that Microsoft was wanting to do by default as far back as Windows 8, and originally had done with Windows 10 before public outcry forced them to back down. That was then, though, and this is now, and in the now, the Windows 10 Store is not winning many converts, so Microsoft is apparently planning to re-reverse course on side-loading.
It appears Microsoft wants users to start relying on its Windows Store a lot more in the future. The software titan is currently testing a new functionality in Windows 10 that prevents you from installing any desktop apps – unless they come from the official store.
MSPoweruser reports the feature will notify users with a warning anytime they attempt installing desktop apps. The notification will be accompanied by a message reminding users the Windows Store is the only “safe and reliable” place to satisfy your software needs.
While as of now the feature is disabled by default, users can head to the Apps and Feature category in Settings to enable it.
You will have the option to allow or block the installation of Win32 apps altogether, as well as the alternative to give priority to Windows Store apps without blocking standard desktop software – this will likely prompt you to approve installation any time you try running non-store apps.
Actually fixing the Windows 10 Store so it doesn't suck, and fixing UWP so that Universal Apps run at least as well as their Win32 counterparts, apparently aren't options that Microsoft has much interest in doing.
MSPoweruser, by the way, are carrying water for Microsoft on this one, calling this "a brand new feature to Windows that will help prevent installation of bloatware in Windows 10." It isn't either of those things, of course: it's not new, and it's not about bloatware. Because the thing about bloatware is that it comes with the PC, from the factory, or bundled with the OS itself.
You see, OEMs like Compaq and Dell are not installing programs one-by-one on every new PC they sell; they're copying a disk image to each new hard drive from one with everything already installed, and then just activating the new Windows key. Preventing users from installing Win32 apps doesn't slow them down at all. Even disabling Win32 app installation by default woudn't stop the OEMs, who would only need to enable it once, install all their bloatware, and then disable it again, before copying their bloated hard drive image to every new PC they sell.
And Microsoft's own unwanted apps are, naturally, part of Windows, and thus Microsoft certified by default (and probably available from the Windows Store as well, in some cases), so this "new" "feature" doesn't do anything about unwanted Microsoft apps, either.
No, this isn't about bloatware. It's about pushing users to the Windows 10 Store, and while it's very carefully being made opt-in for the moment, don't forget that Windows Update can reset that without your knowledge or consent at any time.
Cue the Tim Sweeney meltdown in 3... 2... 1...
UPDATE:
I'd somehow missed this tidbit about the Windows Store, back when it first surfaced.
Microsoft’s Windows Store is a mess. It’s full of apps that exist
only to scam people and take their money. Why doesn’t Microsoft care
that their flagship app store is such a cesspool?
It’s now been more than two years since Windows 8 was released, and
this has been a problem the entire time, and it is getting worse. If
Microsoft was trying to offer a safe app store to Windows users, they’ve
failed.
Update:
Since this article was published and spread around the world,
Microsoft has done a lot of cleanup in the Windows Store, removed
1500 scam applications, and has pledged to keep it clean.
We’re happy that they responded and cleaned things up, but only time will tell if they will keep it clean or not. Note: there’s still a lot more scam applications that they haven’t yet removed, so continue to beware until this mess is fully clean.
So... yeah. Maybe keep side-loading enabled for now, and allow users to disable the Windows Store instead. Something which Windows 10 Pro customers used to be able to do, until Microsoft took that control away from them.
Microsoft have been pretending for a while now that their soon-to-be-released new console, code-named Scorpio, will once again make XBox a player in this console generation, even as Phil Spencer talks openly about the entire concept of console generations being outdated. But the reality is that Microsoft's XBox division stumbled badly coming out of the gate for this leg of the console race, and it simply may be too late for them to recover.
Yesterday, we reported on Michael Pachter’s assessment that Sony will not release a new bit of hardware to counter the more powerful Xbox Scorpio. At the time, we agreed with what he had to say- we noted that given Sony’s massive lead, as well as the momentum and inertia that they have on their side, they are guaranteed to stay ahead of Xbox no matter what, and their best course of action was to, well, stay the course.
This is something glaringly obvious to everyone and everybody- if the Scorpio is intended to compete against the PS4, it is going up against a system with a four year head start (or around 1 if you count the PS4 Pro), and an install base likely to be north of 65 million by the time the Scorpio does launch. People this generation associate PS4 as the default console- much like the Xbox 360 the generation before that. Even if the Scorpio ends up being more powerful, it is unlikely to unseat the PS4 from the throne that it occupies in the mainstream gamer’s consciousness- precedence for this phenomenon exists with the original Xbox and PS2.
Not only are the stark realities of the console market working against them, so are the technical realities of having multiple consoles on the market at the same time, with the same brand on them, but with different specs and capabilities. The PS4 Pro has experienced all sorts of technical headaches, with many games actually running worse on the more powerful PS4 console, and only Horizon: Zero Dawn, so far, really showing off the full capabilities of the new hardware.
These issues are old hat to PC developers who have long had to cope with, and program for, the wide range of hardware on which users might be trying to play their games, but for console developers, this is new, tricky, and expensive ground. This was one of the advantages of consoles as a platform, remember: the hardware was always a known, stable quantity, helping to keep development costs down. That advantage is now gone for PS4, and with Scorpio, XBox is about to follow suit.
Of course, XBoxes just flat-out run Windows 10 now, so developers have the option to just stop making games for the XBox per se, and instead make UWP games. That would seem to be part of Microsoft's strategy, here, but it would also, in and of itself, mean that the Scorpio has failed to regain XBox's influence in the console space. It also doesn't solve the problem of developers with nothing but console expertise suddenly needing to develop a significantly expanded skill set to cope with the added complexity of PC game development... and a way of coping with the extra costs involved.
Also, there's the problem of Scorpio not even being out yet, with the first games that will truly showcase its power being at least a year away, if not more. Again, nothing new for a new console... except that new consoles don't normally launch several years into a new console generation, with the market leader having already overcome these new-console growing pains. Nintendo's Switch, incidentally, will face this same problem.
Microsoft want Windows 10 users to switch from Chrome to Edge. They've tried bribing users into switching, and bullying users into switching, but they've ended up losing so much market share that Edge not only has fewer users than Chrome, it also has fewer users than Firefox:
Well, if Microsoft are looking for advice, I have a new thing that they might want to try, which might help them attract users to their shiny new browser: they can fix the fucking thing. Because right now, it's apparently full of unpatched security vulnerabilities -- something of an embarrassment, considering that everything about Windows 10 is supposed to be the most secure ever.
Google has gone public with details of a second unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft products, this time in Edge and Internet Explorer, after last week they've published details about a bug in the Windows GDI (Graphics Device Interface) component.
At the time of writing, the bug remains unpatched after Microsoft canceled February's Patch Tuesday security updates, citing a "last minute issue."
[...]
The bug, discovered by Google Project Zero researcher Ivan Fratric, is tracked by the CVE-2017-0037 identifier and is a type confusion, a kind of security flaw that can allow an attacker to execute code on the affected machine, and take over a device.
Details about CVE-2017-0037 are available in Google's bug report, along with proof-of-concept code. The PoC code causes a crash of the exploited browser, but depending on the attacker's skill level, more dangerous exploits could be built.
Fratric found the bug at the end of November and disclosed it today after the 90-day deadline Google provides to affected companies had expired.
Oops.
In the past, this is the sort of issue that Microsoft would have fixed quickly, and quietly patched as soon as the patch was ready, but patches are now a once-monthly event... something which we now know, for sure, includes unpatched security flaws in their products. Not exactly the way I'd go about (re)building consumer confidence in my new OS or web browser, but what do I know? I'm just a consumer.
I'll tell you what I do know, though. I know that I won't be switching to Windows 10, or to Edge, anytime soon. Sort out your shit, Microsoft.
There are times when Kotaku bore me, and there are times when they frustrate the hell out of me, but every so often, there are times when they get it exactly right, and their headline for this piece was right on sarcastic point:
PlayStation VR Is Doing Better Than Expected, Sony Says
The article that follows is filled with gems, too, like:
It’s not difficult to meet expectations when they’re set low, and Sony was clearly cautious when it came to making projections for the success of its new virtual reality technology.
Or:
While the device has sold better than Sony predicted, it’s unclear how much of that is because of higher than expected demand or simply because the company was never especially bullish on the new technology to begin with.
I find this interest, in part, because the crew at Kotaku were pretty bullish on VR's prospects for a long time, to a point that I once described them as "VR evangelists." Perhaps the VR honeymoon is over?
Reality, after all, is that which persists regardless of what you want to be true. Whatever spin Sony are choosing to put on their PSVR sales numbers, there's no way around the simple fact that they've sold 915K VR headsets to a market of 53M PS4 owners, which is an adoption rate of 1.7%
That's better than PC's VR adoption rate (HTC Vive and Oculus Rift together haven't sold 900K units yet), but it's still not good, and it's nowhere near enough to turn the PSVR ecosystem into something that third-party developers can make money making content for. If Sony are the only developer making PSVR content, then it's not ever going to have a large enough library to become a mainstream way to experience the PS4; it will remain peripheral.
A few months ago, the news broke that AMD's and Intel's new chips (Ryzen and Kaby Lake, respectively) would only officially support Windows 10. The move was clearly the product of some sort of side-dealing with Microsoft; with Windows 7 still nearly twice as popular as Microsoft's newest OS, limiting support in this way effectively undercuts sales of newer-model CPUs, something which wouldn't be in AMD's or Intel's interests at all unless Microsoft had made some other concession elsewhere.
Well, we may have just found out what that concession was.
Microsoft has largely invalidated one of Windows 10's signature concessions to corporate customers, said Gartner analysts who recommended that enterprises reconsider running the operating system's most stable and static edition.
"Microsoft has clarified support plans for LTSB, highlighting restrictions and caveats that could make this an unviable strategy," wrote Stephen Kleynhans and Michael Silver in a Gartner research note to clients earlier this month.
[...]
The most far-reaching change was quietly revealed as the 22nd item in a long FAQ on Windows support. "Windows 10 Long Term Servicing Branches, also known as LTSBs, will support the currently released silicon at the time of release of the LTSB," the new policy stated [emphasis added]. "As future silicon generations are released, support will be created through future Windows 10 LTSB releases that customers can deploy for those systems."
The tying of support to the latest silicon -- to the current generation of processors and associated chipsets from the likes of Intel and AMD -- was broadly communicated by Microsoft in January 2016, and revised in March. However, most of the attention paid to the unprecedented change was about how it affected those running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 on newer PCs. Even though Microsoft also said at the time that "all future silicon releases will require the latest release of Windows 10," there was no clear call-out that the same rule applied to LTSB.
But it did, and does. And there's the rub.
To me, this stinks of quid pro quo. Microsoft clearly wanted AMD and Intel to limit support for new CPUs to Windows 10, thus pushing the market in a Win10 direction to which it clearly wasn't inclined to move naturally; AMD and Intel clearly wanted to be compensated for passing on 48% of the PC market by doing so. And thus, we have this change to the Long-Term Service Branch of Windows, which only existed in the first place "because of corporate customer resistance to the accelerated tempo of added features, changed code and altered UI in Windows 10."
The other effect of this side-deal between AMD, Intel, and Microsoft, is to undercut the appeal of Windows 10 to Enterprise customers. The allure of LTSB was that Enterprise customers' IT departments wouldn't have to spent nearly as much time dealing with upgrades as Microsoft phased out earlier Windows 10 versions in favour of newer ones. That's not the case, anymore:
"Many I&O [Infrastructure & Operations] leaders expected to pick a single LTSB release that they would deploy and run for up to 10 years on all their organizations' PCs, old and new," Kleynhans and Silver said in their report.
"With Microsoft's latest guidance on LTSB, this is not possible."The problem, they explained, is that in the face of essentially annual silicon upgrades by Intel, enterprises would have to ditch the idea of sticking with a single LTSB build for, say, five years. Instead, they could be required to adopt virtually every LTSB version as they buy new PCs powered by new generations of silicon.
It seems to me that this carve-out side-deal undercuts both Windows 10 Enterprise adoption, and the sales of new PCs. Why switch to Windows 10 now when it means more upgrading going forward; why not just stay with what you're already using for another couple of years? Also, why buy new PCs, if your existing software won't be fully supported on them; why not just stick with the hardware you're already using, which is probably still perfectly fine?
Coming at a time when new PC sales have been in decline for years, making new PCs look even less attractive because of the extra Win10 IT support costs that will come with them seems counter-intuitive, to put it mildly. For organizations that use a large number of PCs of varying ages, the fact that Windows 10 now requires frequent hardware and software updates (because otherwise you'll have multiple different Windows 10 versions running on the same corporate network) would seem to create something of a barrier to entry.
If this was the price for AMD and Intel to preferentially support Windows 10 over the (much more popular) Windows 7, as I suspect, then it looks to have been both short-sighted and self-defeating, meaning fewer sales of new PCs and slower adoption of Windows 10. It's as if some MS executive had "get AMD & Intel on-board" as one of their key results, and didn't really care what the consequences were of doing the deal that made it happen.
I suppose it isn't particularly surprising that Microsoft appears to have basically bribed both AMD and Intel into tying all of their new product releases to one specific version of Windows. I'm just surprised that AMD and Intel sold out so cheaply; it seems like they're giving up far more than they're getting back.
Valve have put up SteamVR for Linux officially in Beta form and they are keen to stress that this is a development release.
You will need to run the latest Steam Beta Client for it to work at all, so be sure to opt-in if you want to play around with it.
VR on Linux will exclusively use Vulkan, so it's going to be a pretty good push for Vulkan if VR becomes more popular. Vulkan is likely one of the pieces of the puzzle that held it back, since Vulkan itself and the drivers are still so new.
While Windows gamers with sufficiently beefy systems have been enjoying the resurgence of interest in virtual reality, those on alternative platforms have largely been left out. For those watching Valve's progress in the arena, this can particularly sting: The company made much of launching its own gaming-centric operating system, SteamOS, but has thus far failed to port its own SteamVR platform - leaving those running SteamOS-based Steam Machines unable to use virtual reality functionality, until now.
Valve's lack of development of, and apparent lack of interest in, SteamOS has clearly hindered its growth, and their intense focus on VR has been a source of some consternation from those who (like me) thought they should be more focused on promoting SteamOS, or on improving the Steam service itself. But it turned out that Valve have been quietly working behind the scenes to resolve some of Steam's most frustrating issues, and apparently they're also planning to promote SteamOS again... and using VR to do it, while also giving a boost to the Vulkan API in the process.
I'm not especially excited about VR, as you'll know if you've spent really any amount of time exploring the other op/ed pieces on my blog, but I did have hopes that the current trend in cross-platform game development would make Linux/SteamOS into a more viable platform for gaming... in no small part because I'd like to be able to play my favourite games in Linux, rather than having to switch to Windows 10 in three years' time. That ship seemed to have sailed, with Windows dominating OS market share numbers, and Linux developers failing to capitalize on Microsoft's PR and privacy blunders.
Today, though, it suddenly looks like Valve isn't done with SteamOS after all. And I can't help but feel like that might be a very good thing, indeed. Go get 'em, Gaben.
I like to think that while I do certainly criticize technology products and technology companies for any failings -- Microsoft forcing Windows 10 on to customers against their will last year, for example -- I’m fair. I still get as excited about a new phone, or a new version of Windows, as I did in the past, and I don't deliberately look for negatives. The same is true for all other BetaNews writers.
However, a new study finds that tech reporting is generally more pessimistic now than in the past, and for two very different reasons.
The new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), and based on textual analysis of 250 articles from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post from 1986 to 2013, highlights how the tone of tech reporting has shifted in the past 20 years.
In general, the ITIF found that in the 1980s and 1990s, coverage of technology was largely positive, but this changed from the mid-1990s to 2013, when more negative reports covering the downside of technology, its failure to live up to its promises, and potential ill effects, started to appear.
All righty then... Where to start..?
Perhaps I should start with the fact that tech coverage in the '80s and '90s included both the very beginnings of the personal computer as a thing, and the entire arc of the dot-com bubble? Yes, PCs were very exciting when they were shiny and new, rather than being ubiquitous and banal, and people were very excited about the potential of dot-coms before anybody knew anything about how dot-coms were actually going to work, but I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that the bursting of the dot-com bubble, which triggered a recession, revealed that shady accounting and auditing practices had fuelled the bubble itself, and wiped out five trillion dollars in investors' pension funds and life savings, may be part of the reason why responsible journalists are little more cautious these days when reporting on the latest bit of hype from Silicon Valley. Just saying.
Then there's the tidbit that the ITIF is a pro-technology think tank, funded by (among others) Cisco, Google, eBay, and IBM? That it was established to "promote government support for innovation in many forms," i.e. to convince lawmakers that technology is the solution to every problem? Or that the report was compiled by sampling articles from only three publications (none of them specific to technology), and searching for the words “technology,” “worry,” “concern,” “progress,” or “potential?” Because that was their methology.
Or perhaps we should talk about the self-congratulatory tone of Williams' piece, praising his (and his BetaNews colleagues') fairness, while complaining that other reporters "have less time and fewer resources to dig deep into technology issues," while being incentivized to "pursue alarmist stories that generate clicks" in a way that borders on "technophobic." Because anyone must be technophobic to say e.g. that VR is a shit product that costs way too much considering that it's not useful for anything much, I guess?
Also, BetaNews apparently have more resources, and fairer journalists, than The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, and/or The Washington Post. Not kidding; those are the three publications whose articles ITIF scanned for their analysis. Apparently those scrubs just don't know, but don't worry! BetaNews is here to set them straight. Seriously, what the actual fuck?
Perhaps I'm being too harsh. Williams, after all, wasn't exactly making those claims directly. He was just quoting Daniel Castro, ITIF’s vice president and the report’s co-author, in a way that implied that BetaNews was journalistically superior to the NYT, the WSJ, and/or the Post. Because that's what you're doing, when you talk up your own fairness, and then quote a think tank spokesman saying that the rest of the new media is understaffed, underfunded, ethically compromised, and technophobic, to boot.
The rule of thumb here is pretty simple: unpleasant news isn't necessarily erroneous, and reporting inconvenient truths is perhaps the most essential role of journalism. Many tech writers basically repeat press release copy, often word-for-word, with very little by way of fact-checking or analysis; it's not so much journalism as it is stenography. Williams is better than many at calling out the bullshit, but that's not saying much when you consider how low the bar has been lately.
I've been pretty critical of tech writers in the past, something which, honestly, is becoming increasingly awkward as my intended-to-be-about-gaming blog has come to be dominated by my writings on Windows 10, VR, and other tech-specific issues. Awkward or not, though, there's no way around the fact that I did the minimum work of checking Wikipedia to learn about the source of this report, and skimmed the report itself to see what their methodology actually was... two things which Williams apparently didn't do.
As luck would have it, Idea Channel has a pretty decent video this week on a related topic, which I highly recommend:
Yes, technology does have its uses; it just pays to be skeptical about some of the claims of tech companies, is all, and those of their lobby groups and think tanks... or any self-congratulatory tech writers you may come across who are too busy patting themselves on the back to do the actual fact-checking which is indispensable to effective journalism.
I'm not a journalist. I'm not trained as one, and I don't work as one; this blog is done entirely in my spare time, any isn't monetized in any way. But if you are a journalist, and you're still being out-done by an amateur like me when it comes to basic journalistic integrity... then I'm sorry, but you're doing it wrong.
One of the advantages of being a privately-held company, rather than a publicly-traded corporation, is the lack of pressure to keep driving up your share price. This relentless pressure means that, for publicly-traded corporations, you can't just make money; you always have to make more money than you made last year, or your share price falls, which can be catastrophic for people who e.g. have a bunch of your company's shares in their 401(k) or RRSP.
A private company, by comparison, only has to make more money than they spend, or (in the case of dot-com startups) hold the promise of eventually making more money than they spend. Among other things, this can lead to more tolerance for risk-taking and innovation. Facebook lost money for years before figuring out a profitable business model and finally doing an IPO, but Facebook is now a publicly-traded company, with shareholders to answer to, and share prices that they have to continue to increase year-over-year, every year.
Which may be why Mark Zuckerberg was only willing to admit under oath during the ZeniMax trial that Oculus probably won't turn a profit for ten years, and pleaded with shareholders to be patient while he keeps throwing good money after the $3.5B he's already thrown at VR:
“I would ask for the patience of the investor community,” he said. “Because we’re going to invest a lot in this, and it’s not going to return or be really profitable for us for quite a while.”
During a recent media event, Valve revealed that only 30 VR apps have made over $250,000 so far on Steam. Now focusing his company heavily on VR development, Valve president Gabe Newell remains bullish on the future of VR, but isn’t shying away from sharing frank assessments of the still young industry.
Sorting content ‘by VR’ through the Steam store, the number of titles that support the technology comfortably exceeds 1,000. While a few early indie VR titles have seen a few million in revenue, according to Valve only 30 of Steam’s VR apps have made over $250,000.
This could be a fairly discouraging figure for aspiring VR developers, as Steam is surely the most popular source for PC VR content, considering the apparent sales advantage of the HTC Vive over the competition, combined with the fact that SteamVR works with other headsets like the Oculus Rift and OSVR.
This figure isn't at all surprising, considering how poorly VR headsets, generally, have been selling, but it is a little unusual to hear the head of a company that's developing VR hardware and software speak so openly about it. But then, maybe that's just because Gaben doesn't have shareholders to answer to. Valve doesn't have to keep making more money than it made the year before; they just have to turn a profit, and can afford to lose money betting on VR's future, in a way that publicly-traded Facebook may find increasingly difficult, even though Facebook may actually have more cash on hand.
It's a very interesting dynamic, and it'll be even more interesting to see how this plays out as VR continues striving to become a thing. VR really isn't ready yet, and it really does need for hardware and content developers to be willing and able to spend boatloads of cash with no guarantee that this R&D will result in actual profits, ten years from now. Facebook, with billions of USD in reserve, should be well-positioned for this, but it may prove to be Valve who have the freedom and flexibility to actually spend the money, without risking an investors' revolt.
European Union data protection watchdogs said on Monday they were still concerned about the privacy settings of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system despite the U.S. company announcing changes to the installation process.
The watchdogs, a group made up of the EU's 28 authorities responsible for enforcing data protection law, wrote to Microsoft last year expressing concerns about the default installation settings of Windows 10 and users' apparent lack of control over the company's processing of their data.
The group - referred to as the Article 29 Working Party -asked for more explanation of Microsoft's processing of personal data for various purposes, including advertising.
"In light of the above, which are separate to the results of ongoing inquiries at a national level, even considering the proposed changes to Windows 10, the Working Party remains concerned about the level of protection of users’ personal data," the group said in a statement which also acknowledged Microsoft's willingness to cooperate.
Microsoft was not immediately available to comment.
A number of national authorities have already begun enquiries into Windows 10, including France which in July ordered Microsoft to stop collecting excessive user data.
A regulatory ruling by the EU would effectively apply in every EU country, though, excluding Switzerland and (soon enough) the U.K. but including basically everyone else, which could be a significant problem for Microsoft. If nothing else, this keeps Windows 10's privacy issues inconveniently front and centre at a time when Microsoft would very much like this particular topic of discussion to just die, already, which can't be at all helpful as they try to lure more Enterprise users into adopting the platform.
I'm sure that Microsoft were hoping that their legal and regulatory issues with Windows 10 were a thing of the past. This latest news from the EU is a pretty clear sign that they're very much an ongoing issue.
Valve’s President Gabe Newell said that the virtual reality (VR) industry still needs time to develop. While speaking to reporters at an informal meeting earlier this week, Newell made some surprising comments about the HTC Vive headset that Valve helped develop. After acknowledging that the Vive is the most expensive VR headset on the market, Valve’s chief said that “it’s barely capable of doing a marginally adequate job of delivering a VR experience.” As such, the VR ecosystem that Valve and HTC are currently trying to build will still need more time to grow and fulfill its potential, provided that ever happens.
The famous entrepreneur compared the current VR industry to the PC market of the 1980s in the sense that people were originally buying PCs without really understanding what they can be used for. Those types of consumers are also now driving the growth of VR hardware sales, Newell believes, adding that VR will hopefully end up being as successful as PCs were and still are. [...] Valve’s chief also said VR hardware sales are currently inhibited by the general lack of content, adding that there’s currently not a single VR game on the market that could be considered a system-seller.
Newell’s comments are somewhat similar to those recently given by Mark Zuckerberg who said that the Facebook-owned Oculus has yet to develop “good virtual reality.” Overall, it seems that most major players in the industry are still cautiously optimistic about this technology, but everyone is apparently waiting for third-party developers to start making more high-quality experiences for VR hardware. Given that state of affairs, it’s possible that the VR industry is in for another slow year in terms of growth.
OK, a few things about this:
1. PCs in the '80s absolutely could do things right out of the box, which is why people bought them. Among other things, they could run word processor and spreadsheet software (useful for business), and play games (already very popular). They were even simple enough to program for that users could write their own programs for them, and were encouraged to do so; Commodore computers (also very popular at the time) all came with BASIC built-in, and manuals on BASIC programming. PCs in the '80s were not nearly as hard to sell as VR headets are today.
2. Hype drove early sales of VR; now that the hype has died, nothing is driving them. PlayStation VR sales dropped off a cliff after some early success, and the only VR headsets that have moved more than a million units are Gear VR and Google Cardboard, both of which managed to get to market last spring, while the hype was still hot and VR's many issues not front and centre in the coverage. And those are the VR success stories; none of the other VR headsets is anywhere close to doing as well as those three. The hype is over now; all of VR's recent PR has been bad, and the only people still bullish about VR's future are people who've invested heavily in VR succeeding.
3. VR cannot afford another slow year in sales. VR is a hardware purchase, and not just a software purchase or a Cloud-based service, and one that really doesn't sell itself -- even VR's proponents admit that it needs to be experienced in order to make converts. Except that BestBuy is closing hundreds of Oculus Rift demo stations because nobody wanted to try them. The clock is ticking: retailers like BestBuy can't afford to stock VR headsets that aren't selling. If VR hardware doesn't start to show sales performance soon, stores will stop carrying the gear, and that will be the end of the story for this generation of VR hardware.
4. VR isn't going to see a flood of third-party development unless they can improve the headsets' adoption rate. There's no money to made developing for VR, because there aren't enough users in the marketplace who can buy VR content. Given how little interest consumers have for VR, and give how expensive it is to develop for VR, third-party developers just can't afford to develop for VR right now. Which may be why Valve has three VR games in the works for the HTC Vive that they helped develop: nobody else is going to make games for the thing, so they have to.
It is noteworthy that GabeN is willing to be so candid about VR's issues. Zuckerberg's original comments were made in response to questioning, under oath, during the ZenMax v. Oculus trial; he later expanded on them while trying to calm shareholders' concerns about the Oculus purchase, basically pleading with them to be patient after his blunt admission that Facebook would lose money for years trying to make VR a thing. In other words, his comments happened because he had no choice in the matter; he couldn't refuse to answer the question at trial, and he really was forced to do damage control afterward.
GabeN wasn't in that situation. His comments were volunteered during an informal meeting. That's a little amazing, when you think about it, and goes to illustrate why gamers hold such a high opinion of the man. Zuckerberg would never have commented about the current state of VR if he hadn't been forced to; GabeN, by comparison, is publicly musing about how he's OK with it, if VR fails, no matter how much money Valve would end up flushing along the way.
None of that changes VR's fundamental issue, though. The tech simply isn't ready, and the content simply isn't there. And with retailers already starting to check out of the VR gold rush, VR developers, hardware and content, are running out of time to turn it around.
I'm not a huge fan of social media. I suspended my Facebook account years ago because I wasn't using it, never had a Twitter account, and cancelled my Battle.Net account, thus going cold turkey from the one online forum where I posted with any regularity. Perhaps because I'm an introvert, I spend a lot of time (quite happily, I might add) in my own head; one of my favourite ways to spend a quiet afternoon involves a good book and no other distracting people around.
Perhaps that's why, of all the problems facing VR, this is one that hadn't occurred to me.
Consider this: the most popular tech of the last decade has been social. Studies show that when we check email and social media, we actually get a hit of oxytocin, the same "cuddle chemical" that is released when we embrace, or fall in love. That's what makes it all so addictive, and why we keep coming back. Yet VR is the opposite: it excels at novelty, but falls short on human connection. And that could be the biggest factor in VR's stalled growth.
Early in 2016, the research group SuperData estimated Playstation VR would sell 2.6 million units. A few months ago, they revised that figure to just 750,000. At the same time, less than a year after flooding its locations with Oculus Rift VR "pop-up" stations, electronics giant Best Buy is closing down almost half of its in-store demos. Workers from multiple Best Buy pop-ups told Business Insider that it was common for them to go days without giving a single demonstration. People just didn't seem to want to try out the headsets.
That's a huge problem, because casual shoppers can't get a sense of a VR experience just by walking by. They actually need the immersive experience, which requires physically putting on the headset.
But that's where the inherently isolating design of VR headsets becomes apparent. Once you put on the headset, you're separated from the world around you. And sure, that heightened level of escapism is one of VR's great attributes. But if you're by yourself in the middle of Best Buy, putting on a helmet that blinds you to your surroundings may just be a bit more vulnerable than most people want to feel when they're out at the mall.
Even at home, where one can fully appreciate VR's capacity for immersion while in the comfort and safety of your living room, it's still equally isolating — a far cry from family movie night or a games night with friends.
It's obvious, when you think about it. At a time when gaming is pushing players harder and harder in an online multiplayer direction, VR games are all solo affairs. At a time when the President of the United States tweets incessantly, and when people get most of their "news" from Facebook and Twitter, VR cuts users off from the social media sphere completely. While some might see that as an advantage for VR, there's no real doubt about it: VR is swimming upstream on this one.
Cheaper headsets for PC don't fix this problem. PlayStation VR is already cheaper than the current crop of PC options, and although it sold better than the Rift, or the Vive, it still didn't sell well.
Perhaps this is why Mark Zuckerberg has been talking for a while now about "social VR," even though nobody knows what that means or what it would look like, or why Sony tried to convince us that people were going to want to play VR party games, in which one person goggles in and makes an ass of themselves in front of a room full of casual acquaintances who then can't be seen as they mock you mercilessly. It was the closest that VR could come to any kind of social experience, and was deemed to be worth promoting, even if it sucked.
If VR was actually useful for something that couldn't be done without it, and that people actually wanted or needed to do, this wouldn't matter so much, but VR simply isn't very useful. The fact that it's also expensive, uncomfortable, frequently disorienting, sometimes actually nauseating, and has so many other unresolved issues all pile onto this central problem. Add to that VR's physically and socially isolating nature, something that may well be fundamental to the technology, and you may have too many problems to be overcome... ever.
I've blogged about Vulkan before. An open-source, cross-platform Application Program Interface, or API, it had all the advantages of its predecessor, OpenGL, with the same low-level power that Windows 10-exclusive DirectX® 12 offers, was receiving strong support from AMD and Valve, and was already being baked into Unreal Engine 4, which Nintendo is recently promoting as the tool for Switch third party development. There really was only one thing holding it back: a lack of support from Intel, who arguably make the best-performing CPUs for PC gaming.
Intel has officially added support (via CIO) for the Vulkan™ graphics API for its most recent Core chips on Windows 10. While Vulkan is already supported on graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA, the integrated graphics in Intel's Kaby Lake and Skylake chips can now run games and applications written with the API as well.
[...] Here's how Intel describes Vulkan in its documentation:
Vulkan* targets high performing real-time 3D graphics applications, like games, while giving low-overhead hardware control over GPU acceleration to developers. Vulkan* utilizes many open-source libraries and utilities, and promises great performance and predictability, while paving the way to better equip games to handle virtual reality or 4k HDR.
Vulkan support was previously available on Intel chips in beta form, but the official release signals that support is ready for primetime and should be relatively stable. Don't expect your integrated graphics to suddenly compete with high-end cards from NVIDIA and AMD, but Vulkan support should offer some solid performance on modest settings for games that support it. Perhaps more intriguing are the possibilities this opens up for Vulkan-coded apps that could run on the low-cost Windows Holographic VR headsets coming from Microsoft's hardware partners later this year.
Vulkan is a direct competitor for DirectX 12, and should be stiff competition: it's available on Windows 7, which DX12 isn't, and also on Nintendo's Switch, Sony's PS4, and on Android and iOS devices which don't run Windows 10, either. With Intel officially supporting the API, it may have just received the additional push it needs to become the API for the current generation of gaming graphics engines. Everyone is on board with Vulkan... much to the chagrin of Microsoft, who have long been used to DirectX being the de facto standard for gaming.
Not only does this loosen Windows 10's grip on gaming, it might even loosen Windows' grip on gaming, generally, allowing more games to be developed more easily for Linux and MacOS, both of which are Unix-like environments (as is PS4's Orbis). We might even see a renewed push for SteamOS (also a Unix-like OS) from Valve. And it could ensure that Microsoft continue to be shut out of the mobile market, leaving mobile game developers, in particular, no reason at all to develop for engines that rely on Microsoft's proprietary API. Why would they, when an open-source, easily-portable alternative is available?
In fact, the only part of this development that holds zero interest for me is the potential effect on Windows 10-branded VR headset development, simply because I'm not convinced that PSVR headsets are going to perform any better in the market than existing offerings from Oculus and HTC. As a PC gamer, I'd love to have a choice of platforms available beyond the choice of Windows versions; if Vulkan really takes off, that could actually happen, in exactly the way that it's refused to happen until now.
Windows 10's storefront is still struggling to lure users into buying their software through Microsoft, and UWP has been basically awful for the PC gaming experience thus far, but it does appear to be having one significany impact on the PC gaming marketplace. Valve, apparently (and correctly) seeing Windows 10's Store as a direct competitor, have been stepping up to improve their Steam service, in order to better compete.
Tackling CS:GO and TF2 skins gambling and addressing abuses of Steam's user review system were their first steps in the direction of addressing the service's long-standing issues, but the elephant in the room remained: Greenlight. Once a promising program for enabling indie developers to find supporters in the community, Steam Greelight has long since devolved into an open sewer, rife with lazy Unity asset-flips, "games" with no detectable game-play, and scammers. Something has needed to be done for a long time, and some have been advocating for Valve to simply kill Greenlight and replace it with something else.
Well, today Valve announced that they're doing exactly that.
After years of saying they’d do it, Valve is finally getting rid of Steam Greenlight, Steam’s user-driven service for admitting smaller games to the Steam store. They’re replacing it with something called Steam Direct.
“We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.”
So basically, no more courting users to get their precious upvotes. Games will instead be admitted directly onto the store. According to VentureBeat, Valve will do a quick check to make sure game files run and contain, well, games, but beyond that, anybody will be able to get onto Steam. It might sound like Valve is asking for an even bigger flood of shitty games than they’re currently dealing with, but they think the current Steam algorithm, bolstered by the two recent Discovery updates, is up to the task of separating the cream from the crap.
Valve added that while Greenlight helped lower the barrier to getting games on Steam, it revealed nasty rot in Steam’ core. “Greenlight also exposed two key problems we still needed to address: improving the entire pipeline for bringing new content to Steam and finding more ways to connect customers with the types of content they wanted,” said Valve.
Some of the important details are still TBA, like the cost to list a game on Steam Direct (anywhere from $100 to $5,000), but very few people will be shedding tears over Greenlight's imminent demise. Stopping the flow of crap into their marketplace can only be a good thing -- even with the details somewhat up in the air, it's hard to see how Steam Direct can be anything but an improvement over the status quo.
Valve have spent years being infamously unresponsive to community concerns over Greenlight and other issues, but they're clearly awake now, and working to make Steam better, which will make life harder for all of their competitors. Steam basically own PC gaming, right now; it looks like they're finally getting serious about ensuring that they continue to hold onto the loyalty of PC gamers.
Yes, yes, I know... It's probably an issue for me, but I'm still coming across stuff on the Internet that makes me think of Diablo III... even when it's not directly about D3. Por ejemplo, this article at Kotaku:
Overwatch’s PTR just got a bunch of new custom game options, and people are using them in responsible, measured ways to— just kidding. They’re turning the game into a dang Bugs Bunny cartoon.
The new custom game options allow players to boost movement speed, remove cooldowns, change team sizes, ban heroes, and alter all sorts of other values. That’s already resulted in a handful of cool ideas. Also, a whole lot of chaos.
All this, and the new custom options have only been live on the PTR for a couple days. I imagine things will only spiral further out of control once the server browser hits live servers.
This should be a lesson to every game developer out there. The larger population of gamers includes a large number of creative, and often technically-savvy, people, who apparently cannot wait to add content, and thus value, to your game. Give them the option to create custom games, or maps, or mods, and the free content will flow; give them an easy way to showcase their creations for other players, and you can extend the lifespan of your game by years, all at zero cost to you. Even the mod tools don't cost anything, since they're probably the same ones you used to make the game's official content in the first place. The other option, of course, is to lock down your game, insisting on rigid control over every aspect of the experience, and nerfing the shit out of any creative fun way the players find to play your game that isn't the core experience you'd intended. Basically, the approach taken by Diablo III, whose players spent years begging for the ability to mod the game... before losing interest and leaving because Blizzard refused to even discuss the possibility. The kicker here? Overwatch and Diablo III are both Blizzard games. As is StarCraft II, a game with best-in-class modding capabilities and an Arcade showcase that makes finding them super-simple. SC2's Arcade is available with free editions of the game, too, meaning that you can play all the SC2 mods you want without spending a cent... including basically-complete versions of Diablo and Diablo II. Yes, you read that right... you can play fan-crafted HD "remakes" of D1 and D2 in the SC2 Arcade, but not as D3 mods. D3, of course, is basically moribund, with Blizzard planning only one new class (as paid DLC) and no other new content that we know of, and players openly wondering whether Blizzard is getting ready to abandon the game entirely, while Overwatch is inspiring a flood of creative player-created content, even before the custom game functionality goes live. The two situations, both in games from the same publisher, couldn't be more different; it's actually hard to believe that both games were made by the same company. I don't think it's a coincidence that the vibrant, thriving game is the one whose dev team appreciates and encourages the creativity of its players, while the team that's taken the opposite approach from the very beginning is the one that's struggling to sustain player engagement. Learn the lesson, devs. Unleash the creativity of your players; give them toys to play with, and an unstructured place to play, and you can reap the rewards of other people's creativity and passion for years. The alternative is for you to maintain the flow of content by yourselves... which, whilecertainlypossible, it a lot harder and more expensive to do.
Facebook is closing around 200 of its 500 Oculus virtual reality demo stations at Best Buy locations across the US, Business Insider has learned.
The scaling back of Facebook's first big retail push for VR comes after workers from multiple Best Buy pop-ups told BI that it was common for them to go days without giving a single demonstration. An internal memo seen by BI and sent to affected employees said the closings were because of "store performance."
[...]
Multiple "Oculus Ambassador" workers BI spoke with said that, at most, they would sell a few Oculus headsets per week at most during the holiday season, and that foot traffic to their pop-ups decreased drastically after Christmas.
"There'd be some days where I wouldn't give a demo at all because people didn't want to," said one worker at a Best Buy in Texas who asked to remain anonymous. Another worker from California said that Oculus software bugs would often render his demo headsets unusable.
"They didn't press on selling," the worker from Texas said of Oculus. "Their main thing was to have us do demonstrations and get people talking about Oculus."
Ouch.
There's a reason why the hype around VR has died down this year, after reaching such a feverish pitch in 2016. It's because consumers really aren't buying it. They're not buying the hype, and they're not buying VR headsets, either, and the nascent VR industry doesn't seem to know what to do about that. The only VR headset that sold at all well is Samsung's Gear VR, which did all of its sales alongside Google's Cardboard -- that was when consumer interest was at its peak, allowing Cardboard to move 5 million units, with Gear VR close behind.
But that was then, and this is now, and right now, consumers have basically zero interest in VR. Google shipped 5 million units of Cardboard during the height of last year's early VR hype cycle, but this year, Verizon is literally giving the much more polished Daydream away with every Pixel smartphone. The likes of Phandroid (who provided the chart at right) are still trying to hype 2017 as VR's year, but for reals this time, unlike 2016 which they said would be VR's year but which ultimately flopped, but it all feels more than a little desperate. You can practically smell the flop sweat.
VR has too many unsolved problems, too few worthwhile apps that make good use of the technology, and no sign that VR's pushers have any idea yet just what VR is really good for; the tech feels like it was rolled out to the marketplace while still being in beta, and the first impression that its made is hurting not only sales of VR, but interest in VR. When the second-highest-profile brand of VR headset can't even get people to try the thing in-store, I think it's fair to say that VR is in trouble.
Consumers are voting with their feet and wallets, and it's hurting VR adoption across the board. HTC Vive isn't selling that much better then Oculus Rift, and even Sony's PSVR is struggling. VR isn't ready yet, and companies fighting for their share of the VR market may do better to work together on solving the platform's issues, so that they actually have a market to divvy up. Because right now, they really don't.
Users of Windows XP or Windows Vista, however, may want to give Firefox another try. From Digitaltrends:
Many reasons exist to upgrade to Windows 10, and for Windows XP and Vista users — which according to some data represent a bit more than 10 percent of all PC users — perhaps the biggest reason is for the night-and-day differences in support and security that Windows 10 provides. Google just offered another reason update to Windows, specifically that Gmail will reduce support for Windows XP and Vista, as Google announced on the G Suite blog.
While those users will still be able to access their Gmail messages, they will be doing so with the much less robust HTML version as early as December. The Windows version is actually a secondary cause of the reduction in functionality. More specifically, Google will be shifting all users running Chrome Browser v53 or below and it just so happens that the latest Chrome version supported on Windows XP and Vista is v49.
[...]
Google’s specific statement regarding the reduced functionality is as follows: “Gmail will continue to function on Chrome Browser v53 and below through the end of the year. Users who remain on Chrome v53 and below could be redirected to the basic HTML version of Gmail as early as Dec 2017.”
As a Windows 7 user who's currently running Chrome v56, I can say categorically that this does not affect users of Win7 and up (unlike some reports that you may have seen), so 47.2% of Windows users will not be affected by this. Chrome, however, currently runs on 57.9% of all PCs, so there's definitely some significant portion of PC's Chrome user base that will be affected by this. It will be interesting to see whether those users stick with Chrome and accept the reduced Gmail functionality, or switch to Firefox to get a better experience.
The odds of them dumping Gmail, naturally, I rate at basically zero. Switching your email address is such a pain in the ass to do, I can't imagine that anyone will bother with it, especially since the main cloud-based email alternative is probably Hotmail, which Microsoft is presumably keen to marry to both Bing and Edge.
When Oculus dodged the big legal bullet earlier this week (i.e. a civil finding of basically industrial espionage), I figured that all the big drama was over with this one. Yes, Facebook would pay a steep price for failing to do their due diligence before buying Oculus, but $500M is chump change for a corporation with tens of billions in their cash reserve, and the jury declined to find that the Rift was based on tech that Oculus had outright stolen -- which should have meant the business of VR could go on without any further litigation drama. Facebook and ZeniMax somehow both turned out to be horrible losers, though, with Facebook planning to appeal the damages that were awarded, Carmack openly talking smack about ZeniMax's case (something that I'd think Facebook's legal counsel would have recommended against, but whatevs), and ZeniMax escalating things by talking about seeking an injunction to stop sales of the Rift. Since the decision specifically found that the Rift wasn't built using stolen tech, it was unclear to me what ZeniMax's reasoning would be for seeking such an injunction, or why any sane judge would grant it, so I was a little surprised to see so many tech journalists basically salivating over the possibility that the injunction might actually be granted. But litigation in the U.S. is bananas, and it looks like there may actually be a chance that ZeniMax can still cause some trouble for Oculus/Facebook, after all. From Brian Crecente at Polygon:
It might seem unusual that a company can be found not guilty of stealing a trade secret, but guilty of copyright and that that decision could scuttle a product already on the market.
Joe Ahmad, a founding partner at Houston law firm Ahmad, Zavitsanos, Anaipakos, Alavi & Mensing P.C., said that’s because it’s much easier to prove the copyright infringement. And in this case, the thing copyrighted is some of the code used to run the Oculus Rift headset.
“I would think the injunction is potentially much more important than the damages award, especially to a company as large as Facebook,” Ahmad said. “What ZeniMax would have to show is that it will see imminent harm and an irreparable injury without the injunction, and harm for which there would be no adequate remedy by an award of monetary damages. With respect to the last factor, typically, the plaintiff would argue that it would be difficult if not impossible to measure the amount of monetary damages stemming from the harm, an injunction is necessary to prevent the harm.
“One typical injunction could be to prevent the sale of the offending product, the Rift, but there are other possibilities as well. The prospect of such an injunction often prompts settlement discussions. One common arrangement would be a licensing agreement between the parties.”
For the record, I still think that ZeniMax are going to lose this one. Even if they find a really sympathetic judge willing to grant an injunction, Facebook can (and will) simply appeal it... and appeal again if that appeal isn't granted, and so on, and so on. Facebook is planning to lose money on Oculus for the next decade; an injunction that stops them from selling the Rift for a few months doesn't seem likely to force them to settle with ZeniMax for a share of Oculus' eventual profits. Especially since they're appealing that copyright-infringement part of the decision, anyway. Also, Oculus is already losing the fight for VR market share, so there's no particular reason to think that an injunction against the Rift would change the state of play in VR:
Now, I didn't think that ZeniMax were going to be able to make any more legal trouble for Facebook at all, so maybe I'm wrong here, too, and maybe Facebook will try to settle out of court to avoid any possibility of losing any more VR market share at a time when the VR market still barely exists and isn't growing all that rapidly, anyway. I seriously doubt it, but what do I know? It is clear, though, that ZeniMax are planning to make this is difficult as they can for Facebook, apparently heedless of the cost to themselves, so the drama will continue for a while yet. Make some popcorn, I guess, and watch the show.
Seriously, I haven't seen press coverage like this of a Blizzard game, any Blizzard game, since D3's Error37-laden launch. It's amazeballs. Today's gem comes from MMO Examiner:
The Diablo community are always one to voice their opinions, and a
recent thread in particular has certainly got tails up on the official
forums. Players have been called upon to sum up in one sentence the
single worst thing about Diablo III.
This as expected prompted a number of diverse responses. There isn’t
much of a recurrent theme, though a few players did point out their
disdain for RNG (Random Number Generator), with users such as Zeddicuus
stating: ” RNG on my gear for the quality of the gear that just RNG’d is
getting a bit much.” For those unfamiliar, RNG in a nutshell is that
stats on dropped items in Diablo III are randomly generated from a list
of possible stats for that corresponding weapon/armor slot.
Others are quick to point out what has been a criticism ever since the
content revealed at Blizzcon 2016, in that there is little to enjoy from
re-releasing previous features. Province’s biggest problem is
“Re-worked existing crap instead of new content.” Others go on to point
out a lack of trading, no advanced skill tree system and a lack of
creative freedom for players during the game.
The lack of robust RPG elements has been a sore point since the game launched without them, and then failed to add them in the Reaper of Souls expansion, and the game's over-dependence on items (and thus RNG) is a direct result of that. Any sufficient deep dive into D3's official forum will turn up thousands of posts on these subject, going all the was back to the pre-launch beta. So, none of this new. Today is, however, the first time I've seen an item pop up in a Google News search that actually acknowledges these long-standing issues. You'd almost think that Blizzard had jumped the shark, or something. GG, Blizzard. GG.
Microsoft's addition of a Game Mode to Windows 10 doesn't seem to be winning the hearts and minds of PC gamers. At least among Steam's user base, the latest stats show the OS declining in popularity. From Softpedia:
The free Windows 10 upgrade promo that Microsoft offered in the first 12 months after the launch of the operating system had a massive contribution to its growth, especially in the gaming industry where the majority of users upgraded their computers.
On Valve’s Steam, for example, Windows 10 improved at a really fast pace, overtaking Windows 7 as the number one operating system for PC gaming.
But figures provided by the company for the month of January 2017 reveal something that almost nobody could see coming: Windows 10 has started declining just when it was so close to reaching 50 percent share.
Specifically, Windows 10 dropped 0.48 percent last month to 48.49 percent, but it continues to remain the preferred desktop operating system right now on the gaming platform. Windows 7 64-bit is the runner-up with 29.74 percent, up 0.72 percent over the previous month, while Windows 8.1 64-bit is far behind with 8.14 percent, down 0.31 percent.
The 32-bit version of Windows 10 lost market share as well and is currently at 1.18 percent, down 0.04 percent from December 2016.
For whatever reason, Steam was the one market where Windows 10 really had managed to overtake Windows 7 as the top choice of PC users, and this month's change is small enough (<0.5%) that it could just be a transient blip. But even if this isn't the start of some kind of trend, it does send a clear signal that the easy Windows 10 converts among PC gamers have all been converted; from here, it gets only harder for Microsoft to win new converts.
It's also noteworthy because this is, once again, the opposite of what the overall OS market is doing. Just as Steam bucked the trend for Windows 10 adoption until now, with gamers switching to the new OS faster than PC users at large, Steam is now bucking the trend again, retreating from Windows 10 just as the new OS finally starts to make gains in the OS market overall.
This may be why Game Mode was rolled out so early: i.e. before it's actually working, or at least before it's working well enough to actually produce performance gains for non-UWP games. Microsoft seemed to be concerned about Windows 10 adoption stalling out among users who had been the first to embrace the product, a concern which now looks like it might be justified. It's unlikely that Windows 7 will regain enough market share among gamers to regain the top spot, especially now that it's not available for sale anymore, but if Microsoft are serious about reaching out to Steam gamers and keeping them on Windows 10, they're apparently going to need to do better than "GFWL2."
