Microsoft is going the opposite of what you're suggesting. Their games are coming to Steam, Playstation and Switch. Also, their game division isn't exactly thriving right now. They have a ton of studios, but they are not selling hardware very well right now.

The more that time goes on, and the more entrenched steamOS/Proton becomes, they will not have any sort of easy time trying to lock-in to Windows. Even now in the earliest days of steamOS, there is blow-back when a game does not support the Steam Deck (which means Proton).

Playstation and Switch, for sure.

Steam, not on detriment of Windows, how can they allow something like SteamOS to put Windows to shame, with their own APIs?

I can bet on them changing that, lets see who's got deeper pockets.

I would posit that in this scenario it is Valve who has the deeper pockets. It's a privately owned company and not beholden to the whims of a quarterly driven revenue cycle, and it's a matter of life or death for the organization.

In contrast, gaming is essentially a side show for Microsoft. The resources required to push Valve off it's pedestal would have higher returns invested elsewhere.

Most of their biggest games already are on Steam, though!

Games aren’t going to suddenly start targeting only updated copies of windows 11 though… if they target even win 10 then they need to be API compatible with what’s currently there in windows. It doesn’t matter what new stuff comes out. Just like how we had to keep using ie6 compatible code for ages for the 5% of people still on windows xp even though it kept us from using modern web tech for everyone else.

Depends on how much Microsoft decides Windows Store and XBox App are relevant for game developers targeting the PC going forward.

They can't stop publishers from targeting steam/proton, though. The publishers will go to where the market is. Sure maybe they can restrict the version published to whatever store windows has but they can't prevent the one distributed with steam targeting an older version.

They can on the studios they own, and publish.

Right now, they are not even making their own games exclusive to Windows Store or the XBox App (see MSFS 2024, Age of Empires series, Forza, etc...).

Because until recently SteamDeck was a non issue for Microsoft.

If it starts being a big issue, they won't ignore it.

> They surely can, and Valve got lucky UWP didn't took off as they feared.

So what, assuming it had taken off it would just be yet another set of crap APIs to develop wrappers for.

So is the burden of playing with other people toys.

Still a nicer problem to have than developing “non crappy” APIs that nobody uses or cares about.