The day Bill Gates held a shotgun

Gather around, and hear the rambles of this gamer. This is an epic of Windows as a gaming platform…

The rise of Windows and DirectX

Lets go back to the days of DOS, where programmers had to program keeping in mind all the different hardware setups a user may own.  Game developers wanted freedom in dealing with hardware, but the nature of Windows was focused on securing access to hardware. Microsoft had to create a piece of software to provide developers access to hardware on it’s new flagship Operating System, Windows 95. A team of 3 were tasked to come up with a solution and DirectX was forged! DirectX like it’s competition ,OpenGL,  acted as a middleman between the hardware and the developer, dealing with all the messy hardware translation work and the different possible configurations a user may have. This provided the developer with a single view on things, programming for every PC out there as if it were a single console. At a time where consoles dominated the video game industry, Windows along with recent PC hardware developments came as a looming shadow that would eventually eat away from console market.

In a push to promote Windows 95 as the platform to develop games on, Bill Gates himself appeared in a video of him shooting zombies in Doom. Ever Since, DirectX has been pushing forward to become the primary API for game developers. The success of Windows followed through with the interest of multiple manufacturers to create better and faster graphics cards resulted in a crushing performance advantage for PCs over it’s console counterparts.

PC gaming would then slowly re-gain popularity in the new millenium, thanks to Digital distribution. Fast forward to today, and it’s hard to believe that consoles were once  the undisputed choice for gamers. DirectX ,as a windows exclusive, has established itself as the choice software for game developers while OpenGL (on Linux and Mac) continues to drag on behind when it came to PC game development. Steam was also gaining popularity as the best platform on Windows for your games.

In an attempt to get a bigger bite on the gaming market, Microsoft created a Frankenstein gaming device initially made from laptop components and uses software based on its iconic DirectX, nicknamed the ‘DirectX box’ which eventually became the original ‘Xbox’!

The possible fall of Windows and DirectX

In the last couple years or so, Steam has started moving it platform to Mac and has recently exited the beta stage for it’s Linux Steam. This made the Steam platform no longer a Windows exclusive.

Gabe Newell recently announced the SteamBox, a living-room friendly PC that will play games…on Linux!? Gabe has basically rejected to develop on the mostly widely used OS and more importantly, the most widely used gaming API (DirectX). Gabe has been quoted to slag off Windows 8 calling it a ‘catastrophe’, but to totally ditch it is a whole different ball game! The alternative? OpenGL on Linux, which many modern games were not designed to run on. The first immediate thought that comes to mind is that many of your favored games may not run on the SteamBox since the developers never intended there games to run on OpenGL but rather DirectX. The lack of DirectX on other platforms is the reason why there are so few Mac and Linux games offered by Steam currently.

Gabe is basically breaking away from the cycle of choosing DirectX over OpenGL, for the sake of it being DirectX (click the link, it’s a great read and things will make more sense, trust me). The Wii, PS3, PSP, Mac, Linux… all use OpenGL, but when it comes to PC games, DirectX is king in stats.

But given how Steam is now the best choice in my view for Indie developers, the SteamBox will definitely sway Indie developers to move to OpenGL. If the user response to the SteamBox is powerful enough, triple A devs will have to follow through in using OpenGL, not to mention that you should expect to see Half Life 3, Portal 3 and all the Valve games to use OpenGL to support the SteamBox. This may eventually leave little reason to own a Windows PC gaming machine over a Linux one. But every domino effect needs a good starting push, which is why in my belief it could be the SteamBox that will get the developers to take the first steps that may create the fall of Windows as the gaming platform, demoting it to a gaming platform.

So I urge you Microsoft, remember the day Bill Gates had to wield a shotgun to rally the developers. Other platforms may soon become the choice platform for developers if Microsoft doesn’t move away from it’s exclusivity strategy (not to mention, the trend of the latest DirectX being not just an exclusive to Windows, it’s also an exclusive to the latest version of Windows). Developers will develop for the widest audience, and two of the main reasons why Windows currently dominates the OS market is Games and Microsoft Office (for business and student use), both of which are being challenged by the likes of Steam, Consoles, Google Documents and Open Office. Not to mention that the day where most apps ran on your OS is gone, and we are moving to an era of cloud computing where everything you need is simply online, so software exclusivity on an OS is an obsolete strategy that Microsoft seems to cling to dearly. It would be a shame for the Windows platform to become a thing of the past.

We are a long way from this potential domino effect, as OpenGL doesn’t provide the complete package DirectX does (sound, controls…etc). Users are also currently unwilling to move to alternatives to Microsoft Office for there businesses, aside from some exceptions. But one thing is for sure, Gabe Newell took the first big step on behalf of everyone.