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Comment by gecko | Hacker News Reader

They have a couple of markets they can go after pretty easily.

  * Gaming.  It's fairly easy to port games between Xbox and Windows, and this
    device has been shown to integrate nicely with Xbox.  Whether that's enough
    is anyone's guess, but it hardly seems like a hail-mary pass at this point
    to me.
  * Enterprise.  I do not actually see what you're seeing, at least here in New
    York, that enterprise tablets either don't exist, or are dominated by iPad.
    I've seen mostly laptops still, plus some iPads, some Xooms and other Android
    tablets, and even some Blackberry PlayBooks.  This market is not exactly a
    done deal for anyone at this point, and the level to which Office is
    entrenched in the corporate space gives Windows RT a real chance.

I'm not saying that the Surface will nail these markets, but you're being odd to discount them so quickly.

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The gaming market would seem to be out, since Windows RT devices can only run apps distributed through the Windows App Store, and the Windows App Store refuses to carry any games rated as containing mature content (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/11/windows-8-marketp...).

In other words, no matter how easy they would be to port, you couldn't make versions of Skyrim, Borderlands 2, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, or Resident Evil 6 to run on Windows RT, simply because Microsoft will not allow you to sell them to Windows RT users. All those titles have content ratings higher than MS will allow for distribution through the App Store.

Ruling out AAA titles feels like a pretty severe blow to any ambitions WinRT might have to be a gamer's OS. Which isn't to say they won't sell games for it; just that it won't be games driving the sales of WinRT devices.

You have a good point, but I've been assuming that Microsoft would drop their refusal to allow mature content, at least for big-title games, if any of the game studios expressed serious interest in porting to Windows RT to begin with. We'll have to see. If I'm wrong, then I'm with you: Windows RT will never be the gamer's mobile platform. But I assume that they'll yield as soon as there's a real reason to do so.

Where it gets screwy in my mind is whether Windows RT still has a shot at being a major casual gaming platform, in the style of iOS. Android, iOS, webOS, and I believe PlayBook all use OpenGL ES. Windows RT (and Windows 8 Phone) only offer DirectX. It's not that it's even that difficult to target both; it's simply that no one has yet done so, because the only meaningful mobile platforms run OpenGL ES. This puts Windows RT and Windows 8 Phone into a very chicken-and-egg position for casual gaming, and I'm not clear that it can win that one.

I'm sure this project is going to get a lot of use; As a supported of free software, I would have been much happier if this was GPLd or at least LGPLd. Alas, it's BSD license, which means that it's going to help the Win8RT echosystem tremendously :(

https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/

ANGLE: Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine. The goal of ANGLE is to allow Windows users to seamlessly run WebGL and other OpenGL ES 2.0 content by translating OpenGL ES 2.0 API calls to DirectX 9 API calls.

That's not entireially true. The App store 18+ isn't the same as ESRB mature but ESRB AO+.

>> Apps with a rating over PEGI 16, ESRB MATURE, or a corresponding rating under other ratings systems as described in the table below, are not allowed.

src http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh69408...

I was going off the PEGI ratings -- all the titles I cited are PEGI 18.

i expect that's not region sensitive either. in the UK the BBFC classified Skyrim as a 15.

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/website/Classified.nsf/ClassifiedWorks...

eta: although that now seems to be merely a historical curiosity, since the BBFC no longer rates games - we use PEGI instead.

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