[CyberShadow]

Sorry, you are talking about something else too.

My comment was about monopolies and how they creep into other fields through lock-in and proprietary technology which restrict choice. You have warped my comment into one advocating for a fully open platform stack, a strawman. At this point, why not also argue that the games are open source too? I mean, that would be nice, but it wasn't what I was saying.

> Which are also made by companies just like Microsoft.

And that's fine, as long as it doesn't come with strings attached such as "This technology shall only run on Microsoft Windows" or "All users of this technology, even open-source projects, must pay royalty fees".

[fsloth]

Sorry, - strawman was not intended. As a person with some experience in the graphics industry, the way I see it: if one uses hardware accelerated real time graphics capability, one is always effectively locking some parts of the rendering codebase in to some specific hardware platform. No matter what the API used to program the platform, you are effectively locked in to very few vendors. There really is no rational reason to highlight Microsoft as especially bad player in this market - on the contrary (as long as they are not the only game in town, of course).

[shmerl]

> There really is no rational reason to highlight Microsoft as especially bad player in this market - on the contrary (as long as they are not the only game in town, of course).

How are they a good player, if they could back Vulkan instead of pushing lock-in DX12, but they didn't? It's clearly bad.

[fsloth]

If they would actively block good Vulkan implementations on Windows - yes, that would be a dick move. Is that the situation, though?

[shmerl]

They actively block it on Xbox.

[fsloth]

Ok, fair enough. Although I don't see the benefit of opening multiple graphics API:s on a closed hardware platform that is the Xbox console.

[shmerl]

That's what "closed" here means :) I.e. they block competition.