Microsoft reduces PC Windows Store cut to just 12 percent

[LucasTaves]

@anon61298298

Is this it?

Good stuff on the “unpackaged Win32 apps” front. Hopefully that also implies free access to the files.

Thanks for the links

I think it will because the encryption is provided as a feature for the previous uwp packages: The developer could flag which files could be modified and which weren’t. I just don’t remember if you could allow every single file including the main .exe, or if you needed to break it down in packages if you want to enable modifications at some of the modules (for example in Bethesda games, they would have to remove the scripting engine from the main exe into it’s own file to enable it to be modified, while keeping the main exe safe).

For a regular win32 installer I don’t think they even have a way around that, save from virtualizing the installation and protecting everything (which would make the gaming community very mad, and since this new update seems to be driven by the gaming side I think it’s unlikely).

And also, Ms said in the latest financial results, that there’s a huge market in selling mods for games, that this was one of the big reasons they acquired bethesda, since they have so many tools for it. So I think they might be planning a full overhaul in that regard too, allowing users to submit mods to the store and such, so in general they should improve/make it easier for games to be modified

[FyreWulff]

Good. No digital store should have a 30% royalty, 30% is insanely high.

[FyreWulff]

@beastmode10

Although that is expected – it seems – from the forthcoming Windows Store update (courtesy Windows Central), we have to see how they address trust and security issues that traditional UWP handles so well.

Even if they do a background security check, it should pave the way for Win32 downloads, and delinking from the Windows Store services overall.

Extremely likely all Win32 apps sold after this update will be in a UWP meta container. All new “Win32” features are actually UWP bridges, like XAML Islands that let Win32 apps access UWP functions… Think of it like Win32 is Classic Mac, UWP is Cocoa, and now MS is implementing their own Carbon to bridge apps from one to the other. UWP isn’t going anywhere.

Steam will drop Windows 7 after Chrome drops Windows in 2022, which is the last major Win32-only Windows, and to use Steam at that point you’ll need Windows 10 (Windows 8 has barely a little over 1% of users on Steam…)

[beastmode10]

@FyreWulff

Extremely likely all Win32 apps sold after this update will be in a UWP meta container. All new “Win32” features are actually UWP bridges, like XAML Islands that let Win32 apps access UWP functions… Think of it like Win32 is Classic Mac, UWP is Cocoa, and now MS is implementing their own Carbon to bridge apps from one to the other. UWP isn’t going anywhere.

Steam will drop Windows 7 after Chrome drops Windows in 2022, which is the last major Win32-only Windows, and to use Steam at that point you’ll need Windows 10 (Windows 8 has barely a little over 1% of users on Steam…)

Very interesting. Do you postulate that these islands/metacontainers get automagically added or does the dev do some extra work here?

[FyreWulff]

@beastmode10

Very interesting. Do you postulate that these islands/metacontainers get automagically added or does the dev do some extra work here?

Assumption here would be automatically. If they want more devs to send out Winstore versions they need to make it as easy as possible to do so, so if all you have to do is upload your win32 app and MS does the wrapping/everything for it automatically, it’d be like ‘well, why NOT sell a version over there?’

And the reason I assume they’ll do it is because it makes uninstalling win32 apps via the store work properly, and includes their dependecies so you don’t have to download the win32 app and then do a second install step.