WoW Developers Not Too Worried About Windows 8
Despite the fact that Windows 8 won’t be out for another month it’s already getting a bad rap from video game developers. Gabe Newell of Valve himself even stated that Windows 8 will be “a catastrophe” for developers, due to concerns that the OS could use content filtering to bottle-neck updates for Steam and other platforms. Even Rob Pardo of Blizzard was a bit skeptical of Windows 8, saying it’s “not awesome for Blizzard either”. In general, In fact, it might be said that Windows 8 is one of the reasons why Valve is starting to do so much more work with Linux these days!
However, not everybody is hopping onto the doom and gloom Windows 8 train. Blizzard’s senior software engineer Darren Williams recently announced in an interview with CVG that WoW will be available for Windows 8. According to Mr. Williams, “There’s no particular fear we have of Windows 8”.
To me that doesn’t exactly sound like a striking endorsement of the OS. After all, in a few weeks Microsoft is going to release Windows 8, and new PCs are going to have the OS preinstalled on it whether you like it or not. It sounds to me that Mr. Williams is merely being pragmatic, that there will be people using Windows 8 who want to play Blizzard games, and the company, whether it likes it or not, must be willing to support it.
