It's so goofy it's hard to credit some of these people, like Newell with his "catastrophe" statement, with any ability to think at all.
Brad Wardell utterly misses the whole philosophy that has always, always been behind the Microsoft operating systems for PCs; be all things for all people as much as possible. Run on all the hardware it can. Allow everyone to write programs for it. That's was the philosophy the IBM Personal Computer was built on, and it is the foundation to this day of the PC.
Then there's DirectX. Microsoft doesn't spend all that money on an application suite targeted directly at gaming for no reason at all. They haven't made it the best suite in the industry in order to prevent people from creating games for Windows. They haven't supported game developers across the world in using DirectX so they can pull the proverbial rug out from under them.
I am convinced that Newell is a crook. I've often wondered why no one came along and did what Steam does, except better, because Steam was terrible for a long time and only in the last couple of years has it come to be reliable enough that game devs want to include Steamworks with their games. I think Newell is the Steve Jobs of gaming, and HE is the one that wants a closed system, not Microsoft; all he is trying to do is misdirect people so they don't smell the stinky deals he's made to put Steam in the position it is today.
Blizzard - oh boy, I'm beginning to wonder why I ever liked that company. No, I do know why, they used to be a company of gamers that made games they were enthusiastic about. They've lost that, and now we have people like Rob Pardo whose entire thrust is to turn Blizzard into another social medium, a place you are hooked into to connect with your friends. A place you come to gossip while you keep your hands busy with a "game". The direction World of Warcraft has taken shows that, and the online-only Diablo 3 is strong evidence if not proof of what I'm talking about.
What we are seeing here is people trying to lock in gamers to their format that are afraid of competing with Microsoft - and nothing else. Okay maybe some of them are just Chicken Little types running around screaming that the sky is falling, and are just ignorant and not trying to smear Microsoft's image like a crooked politician against his competition, but the big mouths behind the complaints are doing just that.
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