The main advantage we have is Steam and its massive domination in the PC digital market.

Microsoft will push their own store and agenda, but they will only have their own games and the ports they can buy, because the rest of the industry won't stop selling their games through their own store or Steam because that's where most of their sales come from. And unless Valve decides to jump into the UWP, which is as likely as seeing a penguing in the Sahara desert, UWP will remain a niche market that will not please Microsoft, who will abandon it like they abandoned GFWL.

Steam is like the "People's Champion".
PC gamers love and adore Steam.

That is what Microsoft truly has to compete with... Shoddy console ports which doesn't support PC centric feature's isn't going to win over anyone.

It's ironic... Because even though Microsoft is porting more games over to the PC now than it ever has... It feels like they are supporting the PC less than they were a few years ago, because their locked-down games are not ending up on Steam probably due to some exclusivity deal Microsoft has...

To be fair, not bringing their own games to Steam and sell them through their own store is perfectly valid. That's what EA or Blizzard do and no one attacks them for that.

I don't buy EA games on PC for that exact reason though. :P
Origin is a piece of crap that deserves to be burned in the fires of hell.
Ubisoft's uDontPlay is an even larger piece of garbage.


Blizzard I am fine with as it's pretty much status-quo for me for the last 20 years.. Haha And at-least their crap actually works as intended... And Blizzard has a track record of supporting their software for over a decade.

Agreed, the PC's biggest plus as a platform has always been flexibility, freedom and diversity of software. MS are not going to make PC gamers happy with this, adding xbox titles to the windows store more or less adds insult to injury for me, I never cared about that and would get an xbox if I wanted xbox games.

I only use Origin for the free games they give every now and then, and I don't have a problem with it, and while UPlay doesn't work as well as it should, Ubisoft sells their games through Steam, so it's not the same case.

But the thing is that we can and should criticize MSoft for what they are trying to do with the PC gaming ecosystem, not for keeping their games to their own store.

All I ever wanted Microsoft to do is release the games on Steam without their own invasive DRM.
They can have those same games on the Windows Store with all their bells and whistles... And I wouldn't have cared.

But they haven't done so. :/
EA gets the same criticism from me as well, it annoys the hell out of me knowing I have Mass Effect 1+2 on Steam, but 3 will never be available.

I also wanted MSoft to launch their games on Steam. I'd love to play Quantum Break or the announced at last E3 Halo Wars 2, but they have the right to lock them to their store even if we don't like it. And I don't like it.

Not having Mass Effect on Steam is also a bummer, but even if it requires Origin, you can buy a physical copy of ME3 to play it. That's what I did (actually, that's what I did with all three ME games), and it's what I'll do with Andromeda if the game is good and there's a physical edition.

I'm not going to miss some games I want to play just because they aren't on Steam.

It looks like behind Nadella's polite and softer manners MS hasn't lost at all its greed and lust for power and monopoly it had in Ballmer era. Our only hope is that excessive greed make it shot itself in the foot. Of the competing services, Steam is arguably the most closed (on PC, and if we exclude some publisher-specific services), but Valve can afford to try and bind its users in a far looser way than MS, as with Steam it just wants to make people use its gaming services and above all buy games through them, but it hasn't a hidden agenda of establishing an OS monopoly, that's what makes MS services different, its not so hidden agenda is so overwhelming, it's so obsessed with it, that it eventually leads it to make its services awful for gamers used to a more open environment and market.

This. Hating on Microsoft just seems like the cool thing to do nowadays...