I just want to play Forza Horizon UWP free.
If it ends up on Steam that's a bonus at this point.
Hmmmm...don't see them putting their big first party stuff on steam.
Right now it's only things not developed fully in house and only after they have finished development.
Forza has so many licensing issues they don't even last on Microsoft's platform. I also think they want to use these as hooks for their gamepass service like EA and origin. They just don't have a plan around pc gaming because there literally is no high level stakeholder who cares enough.
They also seem to not want to put games being designed as a service on steam, and first party development seems to be heading that way.
Never say never of course because all it takes is a leadership shuffle and direction can change.
But I think that's where gamepass is nice. Essentially just renting the game for a few bucks and doesn't require you be all in or anything.
Horizon is great but I'm biased because I used to work at t10. No way I would miss out on it as just getting the big franchises to PC was a miracle in itself lol.
Whether it has a wrapper or not the store issues would still be the same as the game organization does not control that. I'm mostly proud of the foundation work others and myself did at t10 just to get Forza in general playable on PC. Gaming doesn't control the wrapper all we could do was file feature requests against that team.
The real growth was internationally as many never would have played a Forza game requiring Xbox. Once that was noted we added more localization options for the game. I remember specifically doing these for China as they had completely different needs in order to launch.
I mean, it is MS. Could have left because it wasn't successful enough and they need time to come up with their newest brainstorm.
lol. I'm assuming you have never worked at a big corporation in the US. At that level it's like game of thrones. Doesn't matter how successful or not successful your initiative is. It's all politics at that level. And just because someone is spearheading an initiative doesn't mean they believe in it at that level either.