Epic Games' Tim Sweeney reveals himself to be a paranoid crackpot

Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney has been an outspoken opponent of the Windows Store, despite Microsoft’s attempts to reassure him.

Now in an interview with Edge in Edge founder of Epic Games has revealed the depth of the paranoid delusions which are driving his fears.

“The trouble started when Microsoft began shipping some PCs and regular Surfaces that were so locked down that you couldn’t run Win32 apps; you could only run apps that had been bought from their store,” he commented, revealing he did not understand that the ARM-based Surface RT tablets were binary incompatible with Win32 x86 apps.

“That is a complete travesty,” he continued. “With Windows 10 they removed some more capabilities. They’ve been able to do this via some sneaky PR moves,” he ranted. “They make a bunch of statements that sound vaguely like they’re promoting openness, but really they’re not promising anything of the sort,” referring to Microsoft’s statements that apps do not have to be Windows Store apps to use the new Windows 10 APIs and that users will always be able to install non-store apps.

“The risk here is that, if Microsoft convinces everybody to use UWP (Universal Windows Platform), then they phase out Win32 apps. If they can succeed in doing that then it’s a small leap to forcing all apps and games to be distributed through the Windows Store. Once we reach that point, the PC has become a closed platform.”

“It won’t be that one day they flip a switch that will break your Steam library – what they’re trying to do is a series of sneaky manoeuvres. They make it more and more inconvenient to use the old apps, and, simultaneously, they try to become the only source for the new ones.”

“Slowly, over the next five years, they will force-patch Windows 10 to make Steam progressively worse and more broken. They’ll never completely break it, but will continue to break it until, in five years, people are so fed up that Steam is buggy that the Windows Store seems like an ideal alternative. That’s exactly what they did to their previous competitors in other areas. Now they’re doing it to Steam. It’s only just starting to become visible.”

Despite pulling a fully formed conspiracy from his nether region he did not think Microsoft would actually be able to pull it off.

“Microsoft might not be competent enough to succeed with their plan, but they’re certainly trying,” he noted.

We have only one further comment to Tim – get some help man!