Chebucto Regional Softball Club

Windows was wildly popular prior to Doom. Doom for Windows 95 was a showcase for DirectX, not Windows. Doom was on more systems than Windows 95, yes, but that's a little misleading. First off, it was released several years before Window's 95. Secondly, people upgraded computers less often back then, and Windows 95 wasn't packaged with most systems and wasn't distributed online. You had to actively decide to go to a store and buy it. Third, the vast majority of Doom copies were the shareware version of the first campaign. It was tiny and free. People would bring their floppy to a friend's house, or they'd post it on a bbs for download. The port to Windows 95 was a technical showcase of the advantages of using DirectX. It showed that Windows had integrated features that could be used to enhance games with minimal development cost, and that games could be run without having to exit Windows to DOS, which was a huge hassle required for most games at the time.

Yeah, but they were also still making new standalone gaming boxes with a dedicated OS, and they didn't have the Xbox division take the lead on game mode. Linux and Mac gaming also weren't a threat, and the solution to a bloated Windows installation was more horsepower, which was relatively cheap. Now the market is completely changed. The Xbox Series S and X have had their lunch eaten by Playstion and Switch. Linux gaming is exploding because of the Steam Deck, while more-powerful Windows handhelds are performing worse with worse batteries than the Deck because of Windows bloat. Mid-range GPUs cost more than an entire high-end gaming rig from 5 years ago, so high-end gaming PCs are rarer than ever. Microsoft *has* to do something. And what they've chosen, for now, is to partner with Asus to launch a true Xbox-branded competitor to the Deck. To do that, they have to actually be competitive. There's 2 keys to that. One is Gamepass, and the other is moving Windows out of the way of the game experience.

I think this time actually does have the potential to be different. They're co-launching an Xbox-branded handheld PC designed to go head-to-head with the Steam Deck while downplaying the future of dedicated consoles. Microsoft's gaming division is going all-in on PC, so it matters more than ever.

I'm really curious to see what kind of performance gains the Xbox-mode or whatever they're calling it is going to provide. I don't know if it'll reach SteamOS levels, but it does legitimately look like they're taking the bloat's hit on gaming seriously with the Xbox-branded ROG Ally. The reality is that mostly people aren't going to leave Windows, so if Valve and Linux force Windows to improve it's still a win.

Fun fact: The Expanse books (and eventual TV show) were started as a unique role-playing campaign where the person running it (Ty Franks) would write a prompt, the players would explain their character's reactions. He'd then write a story section incorporating that and the players would say how they reacted and so on. There was a core group of characters who were the "survivors" early on, but one of the players had to drop out early-ish, so in the next bit of story that character died. That was carried into the books and TV show, which is why after the core group of characters is established, there's a sudden, shocking death.