Microsoft did at least adjust Game Pass recently to make the files for some games accessible for modding, but I'm not wildly optimistic that it has a deep love for that aspect of PC gaming culture.
I worry about a future in which "Xbox" becomes a totally homogenized experience across console and PC, one that ignores all the special qualities of our favored platform. It's really hard to say no to Game Pass, even if it feels like an ill portent for our already dwindling sense of game ownership, and it gets a little harder to resist with each studio Microsoft adds to its collection. Instead, Spencer has been focusing on games: making them, buying them up, and selling access to them for $10 a month on Game Pass, which now has 25 million subscribers. Today, Microsoft seems to have backed off from its old view of PC gaming on Windows as something to restrict and control, such as with Games for Windows Live, another famous disaster, or the UWP architecture. These squares were a real cause for concern among PC gamers in 2012-including Gabe Newell. Relations between Valve and Microsoft have improved since then, but that hasn't stopped Gabe and company from building an ark to pile Steam's library onto if needed: Linux-based SteamOS, which will feature on the new Steam Deck handheld. Valve boss Gabe Newell, a former Microsoft employee himself, called Windows 8 " a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space" because it emulated aspects of Apple's closed iOS ecosystem. As it happens, Microsoft also owns the operating system most PC gamers use, so, alright, I guess it makes sense to worry a little about its growing power-especially since Microsoft has been known to threaten the openness of Windows in the past. What's really important to me, then, is not who owns Blizzard, but that the PC remains an open platform. It's not just battle royale: Many of the other biggest games and genres and esports in the world started as mods. (And there was also a Minecraft mod, for the record.) It's an easy bet that the next genre phenomenon will arise from a fertile area like this, where experimentation and free distribution are possible. The most current of these is still battle royale, which began as a mod on one of the PC's most open, flexible games: Arma. What kind of post-release monetization schemes will Microsoft prefer, for instance? Will it have a different attitude about WoW addons? There is a danger that decisions from the top of Microsoft will now be so overrepresented in PC gaming that they push it in directions we won't necessarily like, subtly homogenizing the whole scene. The amount of PC gaming's legacy and game development power that Microsoft now owns does present some concerns. It's not as if Activision Blizzard is on a moonward trajectory at the moment. Would Cheerios be better if General Mills made them? It's true that Disney's Star Wars and Marvel movies basically feel the same, but is that a consequence of Disney's ownership, or a consequence of them being the sort of enormous mass-market phenomena that only a mass-market company like Disney could own? It's hard to feel worried that Spencer will somehow violate the sanctity of Call of Duty and Overwatch in a way that Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick wouldn't. For now, I'd put my feelings about Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition somewhere on par with the discovery that Purina Dog Chow and Cheerios are both made by Nestlé: a slight discomfort that slides into resignation.
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