Microsoft has announced a big change in PC game sales

The Microsoft team has been quite fond of PC players in recent years. Since 2017, they have been launching all their games in parallel on both Xbox consoles and PCs, they have transferred the entire Halo series to PC, introduced PC players to the Forza series, launched an Xbox Game Pass subscription on PC, made significant progress with Game At least in Windows 10… Today they are announcing that they will continue with this rhythm in the future and that gaming on a PC will still be just as important as the one on consoles.

To that end, they plan to make a big change for the Microsoft Store and the developers who launch their games there. It will follow the example of Epic Games and will reduce the percentage of commissions they take from the sale of each game and each transaction within the games on the Microsoft Store from August 1, 2021. Until now, that commission was 30%, which means that by selling someone else's games on the Microsoft Store for $ 60, Microsoft would take $ 18, while the publisher of the game would go $ 42. From August 1, the commission percentage will be 12% - the same as on the Epic Games Store.

With this move, Microsoft hopes to attract more developers to the Microsoft Store, through which the Xbox Game Pass also works. The most popular PC platform - Steam - currently takes a 30% commission to a certain level of sales, and just as we saw in the example of the Epic Games Store, publishers and developers are willing to go where they will earn more by selling. The French company Ubisoft, for example, no longer sells its new games on Steam precisely out of protest against the high commission that Steam owners charge for every game or additional content sold.

Of course, the problem with the Microsoft Store isn’t solely in that commission. Applications on that platform use a different (UWP) format than games on Steam, which entails several differences that often do not go in favor of the customers themselves. For example, games that you get through a Microsoft store are quite difficult to modify or do not support modification at all, unlike those sold on Steam. Microsoft plans to overhaul its store and change some rules that have been restrictive all this time, but that has yet to happen sometime in the future.

For now, Microsoft promises to download games to PC faster and install them easier. The possibility of streaming games via Xbox Cloud Gaming will soon be available in selected countries, and they cite the upcoming game Halo Infinite as a great hope. They confirmed that the game will have full synchronization between PC and Xbox (which was to be expected) so that players on PC and Xbox consoles will be able to play the campaign together or settle in multiplayer. Halo will have support for ultra-wide monitors on the PC, the ability to specify triple commands (keybinds), and several settings for adjusting graphics. They also shared the following image of the PC version of Halo Infinite: