While it’s not going to surprise anyone who ever had to wrangle with Games for Windows since it made its way onto our hard drives, Microsoft has continued their apologetic tone over the generally-hated service at Gamescom, with senior director for PC gaming in the Xbox Group Kevin Unangst telling PC Gamer it “wasn’t the right approach” and emphasising the company’s support for Steam.
“Games for Windows was a prior approach where it was more, at that time, like ‘how do we take things?'” he said, “We knew we wanted to help make great multiplayer, we knew we wanted to bring things over… but it wasn’t the right approach. It was the approach of ‘let’s just take those things and transplant them’.”
Xbox One and Windows 10 are being pushed together as a single eco-system, however, and it raises the question that these kinds of moves could be made to try and cut Steam out of the equation for the unified approach of using the Windows Store. That’s not the case, Unangst continued.
“We are not intending to compete with Steam,” he told me, “If anything, we want Steam to be even more successful—they’ve done great things for PC gamers in terms of having a single store.
“Over time do we want more developers to come over to our store and offer it in addition to Steam? Absolutely. Is competition good for people? Absolutely. But our goal right now isn’t to do anything else other than support Steam and help it run great on Windows 10.”