Xbox One won’t be heralding a sudden rekindling of love with the desktop, despite the hardware being closer than ever. They’ll give PC ”very, very casual” to the ”graphically complicated” - such as?
Solitaire and The Harvest. I kid you not, fellow PC gamer. The Harvest was released as an app through the Windows 8 store - it does not qualify as ‘graphically complicated’.
Shacknews asked GM of Redmond Game Studios and Platforms, Matt Booty, what’s happening with PC when it came to all these franchise for Xbox One? His reply was that the ”Windows 8 gamer is certainly going to participate in some of that content,” but nowhere near what that ‘Windows 8 gamer’ would probably like.
On their Windows game strategy, Booty said they’ve got ”everything from very, very casual games, like our very much improved and reimagined Solitaire, all the way to graphically complicated games like The Harvest.” Using Solitaire and The Harvest as bookends for the range we can expect coming from Microsoft Game Studios is horrifying.
”We’re talking about console games, but there could be some franchises that also end up with a PC game,” Booty responded, after Shacknews pointed out The Harvest wasn’t a ‘triple-A’ property. ”When I think about more connected experiences across those platforms, it’s things that show up within that family of devices where we’ve got Xbox Live, like Windows Phone and Windows 8,” and “not what you might consider a more traditional desktop PC game.”
It’s clear: PC gaming will get no port in a storm from Microsoft - although Games for Windows Live proved that already. Our only hope for desktop gaming lies with third-party studios and indie teams - which basically means Steam.
