By now, some of you will have seen the murdering of the song Wonderwall released on April Fool’s day, not for just demonstrating how awful my vocals sound after 11pm, but also to declare that if Microsoft were to fix various things with their latest master plan for the technology space, that then I would actually use the Windows Store.

If you want to see it, it’s right here;

A rather weird thing to do you would say and you’re damn right. It is. It is one of the silliest weirdest things on the YouTube channel to date. And yet, there was a very good reason for doing so. Despite what you may have thought, it wasn’t as far from the truth of why I did it in the first place.

Originally the plan was to have some decent impressions of the first game released by Microsoft Studios this year; Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on Windows 10. It was the first real signs of a promise made by Phil Spencer last year that they were going to bring more titles to the Windows Platform and honestly, I thought it would be a great thing in that it would allow people to enjoy Gears of War on their fancy gaming PCs instead without having to go out and buy an XBOX one.

But then I bought it and oh dear God did I regret it.

The vast majority of the meh stems from a few things which you saw in the video.

But given the fact that it glossed over a huge amount of my complaints, I decided to give more of detailed overview of the issues faced when dealing with the Microsoft new world order Not only with the Windows Store, but of course the real first release on said platform people were excited to look at. Given that Quantum Break released today with no PC reviews and mixed feedback on issues so far, now seems a very good time to bring this all to the forefront.

Strap yourselves in, because it’s going to be a long ride.

Ah shit!

With Gears of War, it became quickly obvious where the issues lie. Bad performance being one of the biggest complaints for what is basically a tart-up job of an 8-10-year-old game (depending on what system you played it on). Come on, it should have been an easy slam dunk to get a remastered edition looking at its best. Yet, it seemed at the time of release, that Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was not much better than the original release on PC in terms of pushing the graphical envelope.

OK, it doesn’t have Games for Windows Live, but you still have to sign into the Xbox app on your computer in order to access online features. Of course you have to sign into Steam or Origin to use any games there, but somehow I couldn’t help myself but get the distinct whiff of the Games for Windows Live system, especially when there were times the app had trouble signing in. Perhaps it was purely an emotional response, given that at this point of messing around, I had gotten to the point of looking for any excuse to cry foul at the damned thing.

Back to the fun of the game itself now and once you signed into Xbox Live to load up the game, and maybe felt the need to have some online fun with Gears, here lied another problem. It only allows you to play with others who had bought the PC version of the game.

The Multiplayer environment was so empty that in essence, unless you only played Team Deathmatch, it just wasn’t worth trying to play the online modes. Even then, we’ve been utterly spoiled with other games allowing for far bigger maps and greater numbers of players, like in Battlefield. Basically we’ve moved on and want more from our shooty shooty bang bang.

The biggest complaint however for myself was just how much more difficult it was to capture any footage of the game looking at its best, purely because of the new architecture employed with Windows Store releases which we will get to later. It had reached the point where the only sure fire way of it working, was using a laptop running the game outing to a HDMI capture card installed on the main PC, and even then, that wasn’t all fun. Lower performance, with having to run at the lowest levels of detail, and that issue with the insufferable UI flickering just got on my nerves.

What I had to resort to to even capture any decent footage….and even then…oh dear…

Sadly, because I spent so much time trying to get that aspect to work, that when it came to playing the game itself, I was already in a half assed mood when it came to everything else.

Now granted, this is only a concern for those of us who are silly enough to want to capture what we do in video games for either making terrible YouTube Videos, or maybe even just for those brief moments of awesomeness we have when enjoying such experiences.

But after the recent pushes for developers and publishers to allow for such content, for this to be so difficult, surely just in terms of potential marketing, who is actually going to bother with the effort to record anything? And don’t even tell me that the Windows Xbox App can record video footage, it really can’t right now at all. It was just broken for me, and any attempt at getting it going, was just met with more frustration.

Already, vast quantities of people already haven’t bothered to venture down this road, and with this trend set to continue with Quantum Break released today, it is potentially very bad for allowing us to see if it’s worth spending the money or not. For most of us, that’s the only way now to be sure what a game will be like on launch, given that typically most games arrive with more bugs than Starship Troopers.

But that was only a small part of the bad experience, which leads us onto the second part of the issue, missing features, not only of what you would expect of AAA game releases on the PC, but also the Windows Store itself, an app you got with the Windows 10 OS whether you wanted it or not.

Only with this still image can I finally not get UI flickering….

In Gears of War, there was a severe lack of customisation in the options menus and laughably that performance benchmark they had seemed to perform differently to what you saw in game itself. Not to mention that damned flickering UI issue….

Now, from what I gather, the developers have actually done a lot of work to clear up some of the problems, even to the point of altering the multiplayer to consolidate the few players they have playing already. That deserves some praise, as it shows that the developers are doing their best. But they are also sort of hampered by some limitations of the new application development platform that Microsoft are pushing, creating what is known as a Universal Windows Platform app.

What’s one of them you might be asking?

Well Microsoft wants a strategy of allowing developers to build one version of an application and then immediately build that one app to be deployed and run on multiple platforms without any additional effort on the developers’ part. So of course that handy twitter application you wrote for Windows PC can also run fine on a Windows Phone. Well, for the three people still actually using a Windows Phone.

This is the future….be f**king afraid!

The platform also ensure that the applications run in a sandbox, i.e. it’s cut off from everything running on your device, probably based on security reasons, to ensure that apps all can play nicely with each other.

What does that mean? Well, right now, nothing of any use whatsoever. Better still for some of the features we’ve all come to expect, some of it won’t get fixed until May. So no Quantum Break on launch then for me and a lot of others come to think of it.

With Gears of War, it was easy to focus on what took you out of enjoying shooting the naughty aliens because of the level of impact, and I do wonder this; Was this basically the first proper experiment for Microsoft when it came to the universal Windows Platform?

I would have thought that would have been with the likes of Rise of the Tomb Raider back in January when it was released, but then again, how many people bought it through steam and how many bought it through the Windows store at that point? So given there was nowhere else to buy this game, I suspect this was the only reason all this came to light now.

And course, we have to mention some of the pitfalls of the Windows Store itself.

Probably the only time you see Quantum Break on Ooh Sometimes….( unless someone’s got £50 they can give me….)

Now don’t get me wrong, competition is a good thing and competing stores has become one of the strengths of the PC platform of late, despite the fact you have to have several additional applications installed, each of which are at various stages of providing a decent experience.

Of course it wasn’t all plain sailing when this digital world started out. Valve were really the first to force a distribution platform onto end users with the release of Half-Life 2 and there were problems galore with it on release.

Valve however persisted, seeing Steam as the future for distributing content and with continuous development, they have grown into the major leader in PC gaming today with a lot of functionality and features to please a lot of gamers. The sales at various times of the year have become legendary, and indeed has become a regular driver for long term revenue for publishers and developers long after a game’s release.

Microsoft in 2016, so far has ignored all the improvements in store fronts on the platform, and instead decided that acting like Google Play was better.

There’s a lack of a cohesive user experience within the Windows Store because there are separate apps for everything instead of one area. You know, like you set everything up in Steam. I guess it’s probably because Microsoft want to treat your pc like a f**king phone, because that’s exactly what your home computer isn’t.

Killer Instinct… killer to find the uninstall…

Think you can uninstall the game from the same place you done so for all these years? Nope, you have to go looking for the app itself in the Start Menu, and then right click and select uninstall. It exists in no other place. Even Steam Games make a f**king entry in the Programs and Features area for us to uninstall if using the Steam interface was not desired! If you’ve used Start 10 by the way to alter your Start menu, get ready to get rid of it as the only way to get the uninstall option is to revert back to the original Start Menu.

You have to go to a separate area of the Windows 10 OS to choose what drive your apps get installed too and even then it just goes into one defined location on said drive with directories you cannot access at all. Hooray for lack of customisation….again!

This also has the bad knock-on effect at the moment not allowing modding of any games or content which has been a practice that has indeed thrived on the PC platform for many years. Which is bat sh*t crazy when you think about it. Given big titles like XCOM 2 made a big deal of allowing anyone to customise their product, and the likes of Skyrim remained popular and indeed, selling well long after release thanks to MODs, do you really think that’s a good idea? Even recently, a modder has been working hard to try and fix Aliens: Colonial Marines even, long after it was abandoned by Gearbox as the pile of alien acid it was and for many, still is to this very day.

Age of Empires 2 was how Microsoft chose to demonstrate that at some point, some modding may be allowed…possibly….ish…

Some of the best known games we have today wouldn’t be here unless they were first allowed to exist as a Mod. Again, this was brought up during the Build Conference as something to be allowed, but to what extent? We have no idea! HOORAY, we have so little confidence in this don’t we!

We have a download system within the Windows Store which basically nicks all your internet bandwidth whether or you like or not so you best not be trying to do anything else when you download Killer Instinct. Hell the download system was broken Day 1 of Gears of War coming out which Microsoft had to patch rather quickly.

Want to have the option to backup that 50+ GB of data you downloaded for a game? You know, to save having to get it all again if you reinstall your operating system? That sounds like a good idea, so let’s not do that either.

Microsoft, you even contradict yourself for crying out loud, as the Windows Store states no refunds. Yet, 5 minutes with a Microsoft Customer Services rep stating Gears didn’t work as intended, and low and behold, it was actually refunded. Now for the record, the rep I dealt with was very professional and helpful, so from a customer service standpoint there, I had no complaints.

But due to the conflicting information out there, maybe some of you within the company need to get together to work on your refund policy for your own store so it’s clear to customers? Especially if you are expecting people to pay a ridiculous amount of money for your products. £50 for Quantum Break? Think I’m Quantum Broke….

So why did we not see these problems before now? After all, the service has been in the wild for a while now. Perhaps it’s best to ask how many people bought Rise of the Tomb Raider on Steam instead of the Windows Store, hence why we didn’t really see until now? Hmm, must be everyone, so that’s why.

That in itself is ridiculous as Rise of the Tomb Raider even seems to get faster updates through Steam than the version bought through the Windows Store, with Directx 12 features (which Microsoft is peddling as part of the future for game development) arriving on a completing service before their own god damned store!

Hi I’m Phil. I’m here to ensure you give us money for poor products.

What’s more laughable is that they are now having to play catch-up with implementation of features which should have been there in the first place, at least that’s the impression we have from Microsoft’s Build Conference this week.

I know it’s easy to remember that the pioneer in the space, Steam also had a lot of issues and a lot of things we take for granted now, were nowhere to be seen on launch. It’s still not perfect now of course, even to the point of recent security scares (Christmas was the last major scare with the steam service caching user data).

But Valve started well over 13 years ago, and Microsoft released the Windows Store last year with the release of Windows 10, with no visible changes since then. It’s only with the recent MS Build Conference that now Microsoft are looking to improve the service itself.

If Microsoft wanted to be taken seriously in the PC gaming space as others now are… I don’t know, ask what people would want from a service? You would have thought they would have asked for feedback to try and improve things before we got to this point? Maybe they did, when the Windows 10 OS was being tried out.

But it’s not like Microsoft hadn’t tried and failed before with the Games for Windows Live service, so why did no-one learn from that for both the Windows Store and the Gears of War: Ultimate Edition release? Hell, if EA can actually be one of the first to offer clear no questions asked refunds for digital games, (a truly excellent policy for customers by the way) with GOG and Valve following suit, why can’t the Seattle based global giant be the same?

At least I was able to get rid of it, despite Microsoft stating no refunds!

It’s arguably made worse because Microsoft are also at the same time trying to push everyone onto a new development platform. But with the examples of the platform they have given so far, it’s pretty much putting nails onto the coffin on the whole damned thing before it has a chance to shine and maybe help push things forward in a good way.

Developers big and small are not exactly rushing to the Windows Store right now. In fact, until they see some actual benefit to doing so, Microsoft’s own games are likely the only ones we will see there for some time to come. And who the hell will buy them if they run like complete dog s**t with fewer features? But not to worry, thanks to the build conference, we know Microsoft are updating the Windows Store to allow us to pre-order these broken games as well as buy season passes…..sigh….

Honestly, this is why I couldn’t do a full video as I wanted to, and in essence sat in front of a keyboard, it became a lot easier to articulate the frustrations had. While sometimes watching someone completely bitch and moan on YouTube is funny (hell that’s most of YouTube’s geek content these days), I just felt too tired and drained by the whole thing. So I decided to sing the crap version of Wonderwall with new lyrics instead! I felt so much better as a result, even if very quickly afterwards, several companies slapped copyright on it and have no placed adverts on it. #FairUse

So Microsoft, please, before you try and push things on people whatever agenda you have, maybe just get the basics right and show a good example if you want others to follow. That’s what you’re doing with so many other aspects of your products and services.

It’s great to see competition in the space as then the companies constantly want to out-do each other, to really innovate with new features, ideas and yes, even customer friendly practices. In the end, we the end customers get the benefits and feel much happier in spending cash with those companies as a result.

But right now, Microsoft has gotten the same reputation that it had the first time they tried to do something resembling this on the PC platform. They are borderline a running joke right now and the last thing this service would want to be known as, is Games for Windows Live 2: They done f**ked it up. (I learned that phrase from YouTube….See I’m hip and cool….)

The day Microsoft address the issues listed here in this extremely long blog post, is the day I will be very happy to be a customer of the Windows Store once again.