This is going to take a lot of work...Stadia's launch plagued with missing features, sparse game selection, and unplayable lag

When Google announced Stadia, their first-to-market (if you don't count Sony's PlayStation Now) video game streaming service, there were lots of questions. What would its subscription model look like? What would its game selection look like? What features would the service have? Could even Google get the thing to work? And would Google stick with Stadia for the long haul, even if it wasn't an instant hit at launch?

Well, we now have the answers to those questions, and they're... un-good. One might even call them double-plus un-good. Let's break it down.

Epic Games' big gamble

Having mentioned Epic Games' storefront in passing in my last post, I suppose it would behoove me to elaborate a bit on my thoughts on the issue. Because I'm firmly of the opinion that Epic Games will not become any more a competitor to Steam than any of the other already-existing online storefronts: Origin, Uplay, GOG, Itch.io, etc., for several reasons.

Microsoft tap Phil Spencer to fix the Windows Microsoft Store

The Windows Store has been a wasteland of shit ever since Microsoft first launched it alongside Windows 8. Married to a Universal Windows Platform that never did take off, it has long been a developer- and customer-forsaken place; intended as the channel through which all applications would flow, to both desktop and mobile devices, it's instead become something of an albatross: an awkward, burdensome reminder of Microsoft's monopolistic sins.

This is at least partly why Microsoft rebranded the Store last year; Windows Store had negative connotations for consumers from which they wanted to distance themselves, in much the same way that the Windows 10 name was intended to put more distance between the current Windows version and the wildly unpopular Windows 8. Microsoft only changed the name, though, apparently hoping that a re-brand would be change enough.

Consumers, however, weren't fooled; when they remember to use the new name, it's normally as an afterthought. And, critically, nothing else about the Store was changed; it's still a developer- and customer-forsaken place, where it's both easier and more desirable to search for TV shows than software. This is especially true of games; even when they're running Windows 10, PC gamers use Steam, not Microsoft's terrible storefront, unless they're given no other choice. And Valve is working hard to ensure that they have other choices in most, if not all, cases.

The situation was clearly untenable for Microsoft, and it seems they've finally decided to do something about it: they're tapping the one person in their senior leadership team who seems to understand what consumers want, and to understand that it's important for a business to provide what consumers are asking for, to finally fix the thing. As reported by WCCFTech:

Phil Spencer, previously Head of Xbox at Microsoft, was promoted last year into the Senior Leadership Team where he now reports directly to CEO Satya Nadella as the Executive Vice President of Gaming. Spencer has since suggested that gaming isn’t the proverbial red-headed stepchild at Microsoft anymore, thanks to the importance placed by Nadella himself in this growing market.

We haven’t heard much from him after E3 2018. However, he briefly appeared on yesterday’s Inside Xbox: X018 Special live from Mexico City to make a few statements, the most interesting of which directly addressed the state of Windows 10 gaming on PC.
When asked about what will come next, he expressed the intent to focus on improving the Windows Store (now formally now as Microsoft Store) so that it can be properly tailored towards gamers.

The opposite of hype is not necessarily truth

This probably sounds really weird coming from someone like me, who loudly proclaims his opposition to the cynical workings of the average corporate PR hype machine, but there's a time and a place to stop pissing on companies that are doing nothing wrong.

It seems to be fashionable lately to hate on Valve, who run the wildly successful Steam platform, and I really don't understand some of the pure manure that's passing as for journalism these days where Steam is concerned. Case in point, this piece from Kotaku about the release of Negligee: Love Stories:

Slowly but surely, Valve seems to be letting uncensored adult games onto Steam at last, starting with Negligee, which came out today. The catch is that it’s only available in some regions, and it remains banned in a globe-spanning majority of others. In a thread on Steam, developer Dharker responded to prospective players’ confusion by explaining where and why Negligee remains unavailable.

Because open marketplaces are apparently a bad thing now. Because reasons.

Win10's Game Mode fails to improve game performance

Windows 10's latest build of the Creators Update has been released to Insiders, including the recently-announced (and much-hyped) Game Mode, and curious PC gaming Insiders started testing it almost immediately, with results that I consider to be entirely predictable. Only hours after it went live, and in increasing numbers since then, articles started surfacing, all of them saying basically the same thing: Windows 10's new Game Mode does not do much of anything, as far as anyone can tell.

Por ejemplo, take this assessment from Dark Side of Gaming:

Game mode is a feature that a lot of PC gamers were looking forward to. This mode is available in the latest Windows 10 Insiders Build, however it appears that it does not offer any performance improvement at all.

Microsoft claimed that it targets to improve performance via two ways with Game Mode: a) an increase overall framerate or peaks and b) an increase in average framerates or consistency.

A number of PC users got their hands on this build and according to some early tests, Windows 10’s Game mode is a big letdown as it did not actually offer any performance improvement at all.

What follows is details of tests using actual games "in the wild," some with video evidence, showing no performance improvements at all.

A more rigorous test by Laptop showed basically the same result:

To test Game Mode, we put the latest Insider Build on the Asus ROG Strix GL753 with a 2.8-GHz Intel Core i7-770HQ CPU, 16GB of RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU with 4GB of VRAM, a 256GB M.2 SSD and a 1TB, 5,400-rpm hard drive. Then, we ran some of our standard benchmark tests with Game Mode enabled.

The results were mixed, at best. While all of the games we tested recognized Game Mode, we only saw one noticeable performance improvement.

The GL753 played Grand Theft Auto V (very high settings) at 31.22 frames per second, just surpassing our 30-fps threshhold to be considered playable and higher than the 28-fps it achieved without Game Mode.

But in Hitman (very high settings) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (configured for a budget setup), we didn't see any noticeable changes. Our benchmarks ran within decimal points of previous scores.

This is not surprising for me; after all, I'd already predicted that Game Mode would have effectively zero impact on actual gamers' experiences. 

For one thing, it really is more about UWP games than about Win32 (i.e. Steam, Origin, GoG, UPlay, etc.) executables, While Microsoft claims that Win32 games will be supported by Game Mode, they are architected differently from UWP applications (that uniformity of architecture is the entire point of UWP, after all), and may need to be grandfathered into Game Mode literally one game at a time. If that's true, then Game Mode support will be like game-specific GPU driver support: nice for games that have it, but useless for almost all other games.

For another thing, the performance enhancements are mostly supposed to come from de-prioritizing non-essential services and applications, but most PC gamers keep very few extraneous programs on while gaming, anyway, and running on at least 6 or 8 processor cores to boot, which means that prioritizing the game doesn't actually mean much, in practice. Only live-streamers have a lot of extra program load to worry about when gaming, and they've mostly invested in beastly rigs that can handle the extra load.

So... as expected, Game Mode is more of a PR stunt than an actual feature. It doesn't break anything, at least, which is more than can be said for some of Microsoft's previous efforts in this direction, but it's not game-changing in any sense at all, at least so far... and, let's face it, if it isn't offering significant performance benefits to at least the 100 or so most popular Win32 games right out of the gate, it probably won't get used later on, even if Microsoft manage to improve it. You only get one chance to make a first impression; the fact that Microsoft is willing to let Game Mode's first impression be so lacklustre says a lot about their current level of desperation. 

It's like Microsoft were hoping that the promise of a performance-enhancing Game Mode will move gamers to Windows 10 before the mode even goes live, and whether or not it provides any actual enhancements to game performance. Honestly, I think they're more likely to gain new Windows 10 "converts" in the PC gaming community just from gamers buying new PCs.