Digital game downloads is a big business and anyone can see from the growth of Steam over the past few years. EA jumped on the bandwagon with Origin, and now we have uPlay, Epic Games Launcher and much more. Now Microsoft wants to get in on the action by making the Microsoft Store (which is in Windows 10). The Microsoft Store will serve both sales and DRM roles. More competition in the marketplace is good right? Well as one reddit user found out games purchased through the Microsoft Store are missing many things we expect in AAA releases.
Games purchased through the Windows Store are not your typical desktop-based executable game, instead they are built on Microsoft’s Universal Apps platform. This makes the game essentially a “modern UI” app, and not a real Windows application. This means that the game is missing a lot of things you would expect it to have and has some serious limitations. The first you have no true fullscreen mode, you just get a borderless windowed mode (pseudo-fullscreen). There is no NVIDIA SLI or AMD CrossFire support. And V-sync is always on. These are some pretty big graphical limitations that gamers expect to have with their game.
These are not the only limitations, Microsoft Universal Apps Platform games do not support modding, or mouse macros. So if you wanted to use a mod with your UAP game you cannot. UAP apps do not have a .exe extension either, so you cannot add them to Steam for easy access, this also means no Steam Controller support. You also will only be able to play your game on Windows 10, no other Windows versions or other OS’s.
The store also does not seem to have a good refund policy like Steam or Origin which offer limited full-refunds on most games.
So our suggestion is to NOT buy games on the Microsoft Store! Hopefully the upcoming Gears of War Ultimate Edition for PC is not a Microsoft Store exclusive, although it is likely to be.
Source: Reddit via TechPowerUp! | News Archive
