Microsoft responds to Sweeney’s rallying cry

Windows 10 is not an attempt to close off the world of PC gaming to third parties, Microsoft has said.

This morning Epic founder Tim Sweeney launched a scathing attack on Microsoft’s Windows 10, claiming that its Universal Windows Platform was the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem and monopolising app distribution and commerce” and the most aggressive move Microsoft has ever made”.

The platform holder has refuted these claims, however.

The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store,” corporate vice president of Windows Kevin Gallo told The Guardian.

We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX required.

We want to make Windows the best development platform regardless of technologies used, and offer tools to help developers with existing code bases of HTML/JavaScript, .NET and Win32, C+ + and Objective-C bring their code to Windows, and integrate UWP capabilities. With Xamarin, UWP developers can not only reach all Windows 10 devices, but they can now use a large percentage of their C# code to deliver a fully native mobile app experiences for iOS and Android.”

Microsoft has already pledged to restore functionality currently missing from UWP titles.