Microsoft Takes a Big Step Towards Putting Xbox Games On Windows (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Peter Bright: Ever since the first Xbox was released, an obvious question has been hanging in the air: Microsoft already owns one of the premier gaming platforms, the PC, and both the original Xbox and the current Xbox One are more or less PCs anyway, so when is Microsoft going to bring the two together and let us play Xbox games on Windows? With the new Windows 10 builds, it looks like the company is taking some big steps in that direction. Microsoft has put big chunks of the Xbox infrastructure into Windows 10. This starts right from the moment you download the game: it's coming from the Xbox distribution servers, not the usual ones for Store apps. The game package itself uses a format called .xvc, which is used for Xbox One games, and there are PowerShell commands to work with these .xvc files and install .xvc games. Microsoft Gaming Services includes portions of this Xbox infrastructure; it includes a couple of drivers ("Microsoft Gaming Filesystem Driver" and "Microsoft Gaming Install Filter Driver"), along with a number of libraries that provide Xbox APIs.

The last few Windows 10 preview builds have included some vague instructions from Microsoft to install a special edition of a game, State of Decay, and report any problems with the process. There are no problems with playing the game but, rather, problems with installing and launching it. The instructions didn't give any indication as to why or what to look for. Naturally, people have been taking a closer look to see what's special about State of Decay and figure out why Microsoft is having Windows Insiders test it. Nazmus Khandaker, Rafael Rivera, and the pseudonymous WalkingCat have been poking around both the special edition of State of Decay and a helper application called Microsoft Gaming Services that insider machines are running. Brad Sams wrote up his findings. [...] The State of Decay package does nonetheless contain PC-oriented elements. In particular, it tries to install and update the DirectX runtime during its setup. We the users don't seem to be at the stage of simply running Xbox games unmodified on our PCs, or at least, not yet. But it looks as if the groundwork is being laid. The strange preview of a 2020 Windows release looks like it contains even more of this infrastructure, with signs of a layer to support Xbox's Direct3D variant on PC. "Microsoft could go the whole hog and simply make a Windows 10 PC with a suitable hardware spec into an Xbox that can play any Xbox game," writes Bright, adding: "it might just be there as a simple option for developers to enable if they choose."

Comments

The Console Advantage.

[jellomizer]

The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware.
Game makers know how fast the system is, how much RAM, what type of RAM. The Video Chips used.... A game made for the platform tends to run much better then on a PC with much higher specs in most areas. Because there is code that is needed to account for dealing with different drivers for a set of hardware. When a PC is built, they will often get the Expensive Video Card, but cheap on on RAM, or get a slow drive. Hardware makers don't make it easy for most people to make informed decisions. Core i3, i5, i7, i9 6th, 7th, 8th gen? Sure 8th Gen i9 is probably the fastest, but it is wicked expensive. But am I better off with the 8th gen i5 or a 7th Gen i7? Then you build something with a random bottle neck that will slow down the game further.

Re:The Console Advantage.

[mjwx]

The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware.

The 90's called, they want their excuses back.

That hasn't been an advantage for consoles in a long time. Drivers, engines and interfaces have improved to the point where PC games are hardware agnostic. Doesn't matter if you have an AMD or Intel, Nvidia or ATI. ASUS or MSI.

OTOH, Console hardware being uniform is a huge problem because if one console has a major design fault, they all have them and it's not like that's a rare thing (RROD, YLOD). It also is outdated by the time of it's release. The Xbox One uses a Radeon 7000 series chipset, that was released in 2012 and superceded by the R8000 in 2013, we're currently up to GCN 5th gen of Radeon GPU's whilst the Xbox is still using the GCN 1st gen arch. It's hardware uniformity has become more of a curse.

Re:The Console Advantage.

[blahplusplus]

The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware.

Sorry to tell ya, but games were made better in the 90's before the internet allowed people with impulse control problems to allow game companies to take control of the software. The fact that windows 10 has defacto DRM in it is the worst possible outcome for a PC game nerd who games in the 90's. The console advantage isn't, since console gamers are on average more stupid and less demanding then PC gamers. They are the ones who ultimately forked out for "multiplayer subscriptions" (dumb shit) and stuff like horse armor.

As the masses got internet the bottom of the bell curve came online and their idiot decisions changed gaming forever for the worse. Microtransactions directly incentivized the attack on game ownership which is why multiplayer of most modern games is so fucked up beyond all recognition. Watching quake as a property devolve into some f2p microtransaction ridden game means we are in the worst of all possible gaming futures because the average person today is a fucking mouthbreathing moron.

The last 20 years has been the biggest heist and theft of videogames in all human history while the masses fell on their own sword and put mouth to corporate CEO dick and sucked it. Once the gaming public fell for the mmo scam, the rebranding of PC rpg's to get gamers to pay more then once for the same PC RPG, it was over, it proved the average gamer is a fucking moron. Which lead to steam and then finally leauge of legends - league of legends taught the game industry a powerful lesson - the internet focused the worlds stupidest, richest and those lacking impulse control and concentrated them all in once place. Since telecom reaches everyone that meant corporations had 24/7 access to the dumbest members of our species and those motherfuckers voted to destroy videogames because most of them are irrational and technologically illiterate.

Watching PC gaming subreddit on reddit is watching idiots engage in their moronic thoughts not realizing the battle was lost as soon as you accepted mmo's... AKA not seeing that as soon as they control the game software they were going to rape us six ways to sunday.

It's hilarious seeing the stupid masses think they are getting a deal when their hobby has literally already been invaded and destroyed because they are too dumb to realize when you don't control the software and make sure you own and control 100% of it, that means corporations no longer have to focuse on making the best games they can now just exploit the weak minded half of the population which internet gives them 24/7 access to.

Everything us PC nerds feared in the 90's simply came true as the internet was the greatest gift to software corporations allowing them to steal software from the entire world from the comfort and safety of their offices. Like the world as a giant highschool where the evil nerds used the jocks and normies of highschool to rob from the other nerds. Shit is sad watching gmaing history being destroyed over the last 20 years because of drm and "always online" software nonsense has been a downright tragedy.

Once internet penetration reached the tech illtierate morons of the globe everything went to shit. The fact that steam, mmo's, xbox live subscriptions and drm even exist is a testament to how fucking stupid the average person is on our planet.

Re:The Console Advantage.

[Xest]

Mostly the advantage used to be that having fixed hardware meant that developers could optimise specifically to the nuances of that hardware and get far more performance out of it than they ever could if they were just developing to the lowest common denominator they could reasonably support on the PC platform.

But it's also becoming less relevant nowadays, game development is getting ever more abstracted away from the hardware. It used to be that every game had it's own engine, or at least, there was a fairly substantial plurality of engines. This has become less true though, as the majority of games released nowadays are either built on Unity, or Unreal. The handful of studios that do still have their own engines are sufficiently large that they can support having them capable of performing on different hardware (and in fact, typically do anyway - Xbox, PS, Switch).

So I don't think it's really such an issue anymore, I don't think anyone is building games that are tightly coupled with the hardware on which they're running anymore. Optimisation is often done at engine level without the game running on the engine even having to care; things like shadows, particle systems, lighting and so on are degraded automatically by the engine, as are cross platform optimisations and nuances.

As such, it should be more possible than ever to get console games running on PCs providing the PC can provide the same services the console's OS can (achievements, party chat, cloud saves, etc.), which is really what this article is talking about.

Re:Single OS

[williamyf]

Yes, I know Windows used to come out for multiple architectures, but that hadn't happened since when, Windows NT 4?

The WindowsNT family has always supported multiple architectures in their current builds. Some people (me included) may say that X86 and AMD64 are different enough to be considered different architectures...

But, let's go with the conventional wisdom and count x86+AMD64 as a single architecture.

Pre-windows2000, there was support for x86, Alpha, MIPS and PPC.

In windows2000 they stopped supporting PPC and MIPS (early betas had PPC and MIPS support). There was a Win2000 port for Alpha that got Axed by DEC shortly after release. Also in Windows 2000 there was the port of NT server for Itanum (last windows to support Itanium was server 2008R2, released on 2009, with no end of support in sight).

As you clearly note, PowerPC was a supported architecture From NT 3.1 all the way to the Xbox360 (mantained until 2016).

2012 brought Windows Phone 8 and windows RT supporting ARM, support which continues to this day.

So, NT never has stopped supporting multiple architectures. But right now, the current builds support X86/AMD64 and ARM only.

Re:Single OS

[Computershack]

You won't need to re-buy games. Microsoft already have the Play Anywhere scheme for quite a few titles so for example buy the digital version of Forza Horizon 4 on your Xbox and you can download the PC version from the MS Store for free.