A lot of thoughts on the game stores on Xbox:
John is definitely a nostalgic person. He worries that having many game stores on the xbox would mean more trash games, but acknowledges that's already the case on Nintendo. It's already the case on Steam, which is a device he loves, which also allows you to run almost the entire history of trash games. Honestly I think he's just being defensive about the closed-platform console because that's what he grew up with. That's fine, but the days of having super special hardware are long gone. Designing processors is just too expensive, which is why they've all settled on variants of generic pc parts. I think the time for protecting the closed system is long gone, because it doesn't actually bring any benefits. You no longer get some special box with special instruction sets that are incompatible with everything else, so you basically gain nothing and lose an open platform. It seems like quality control for the stores are basically non existent anyway, because tons of games launch with horrible problems. They even talk about Outcast launching in a really bad state on Playstation.
I also don't know if having many stores means a steam deck style ability to run any old pc game. It could be the case that they'll still have specific xbox apis, so you need to run an xbox version, but you'll be able to buy them from any store. I do think it would be smart to basically open it up, and use it as an opportunity to improve the pc experience as well. Basically have the PC version and the Xbox version be the same game, but the Xbox version launches with a specific preset that has guarantees to run well.
My main concern is the Xbox app on PC is absolute garbage, so I have no idea if they can pull this off. Also wonder how they'll control other software on the Xbox or if they'll care. Would you be able to run some random application? How would they guarantee resources for games if people starting loading a whole bunch of bloat.
My hope is that Microsoft is taking this very seriously and they come up with a stripped down version of Windows that's tailored for gaming, and that anyone can use and make the xbox apis open so if someone is using an APU with HUMA, then they can take advantage of the same code path an xbox would run. Modern software is a nightmare, everything getting bloated, worse and with increased latency despite getting faster and faster PCs. I think Valve is the only company that really gets it. I would consider switching to a steam os if it didn't have issues with anti-cheat software. But maybe Microsoft can use this as an opportunity to unify and improve the ecosystem. Ironically the Xbox 360 tile interface was so responsive, and I'd rather use some version of that that most modern interfaces.
