Windows Store sucks

I was trying to get Shadowplay to run on Tomb Raider for Windows 10 and any and all overlays are disabled. Even FRAPS doesn't work. There is no built-in benchmark in the game so I wanted to use a tool to help me but sadly, can't use it.

Not only that but the exe is hidden somewhere within the C drive and I need to modify a bunch of user access to enter the folder.

I also cannot choose where exactly I want my Windows Store apps installed. I can only choose the drive but I cannot be more specific.

Also from what I notice you cannot reacquire files if they are missing from your games like Steam. Neither can you use mods because the game files seem to be hidden behind a wall.

GeForce Experience also doesn't work on it so I cannot down-sample from 3060x2036 like I do my other games. Damn it Microsoft. You had one job!

It is complete and utter garbage. Microsoft learned nothing from GFWL. If anything, games through the Windows Store are worse. It limits the user to a useless extent and I have no idea why they couldn't just go the simple route. They actively try to take away freedom from the end user.

Hopefully, they fix all of that in future of date but as of now, it is far, far worse than other clients like Origin, Steam, Uplay or GOG.

It's made with casual user in mind and with an emphasis on ease of access so that you don't feel as if you were using a computer at all but a simple service. So what did you expect?

I can see where you are coming from, though.

Yep, the games also doesn't run in actual fullscreen, it runs in a borderless window so there's no Vsync and Crossfire/SLI won't work.

@Salt_The_Fries: So not only is my irl freedom taken away from me because of 'terrorists'. Now my pc freedom is taken away from me because of 'casual users'? What's next, casual terrorists?

You forgot limited payment methods.

Epic fail after another.

@evil_spike: Do we know if there are any plans to patch all of this? Jesus it's horrible.

yeah , I heard that too ...

DSO :

The Windows store version of Rise of the Tomb Raider does not support exclusive full screen and SLI/Crossfire, and PC gamers can’t use third party overlay programs (such as FRAPS or MSI Afterburner).

So if I understand, while FRAPS may be running in the background, a game from Windows Store is set to supersede everything else in display, preventing you from seeing the fps data that FRAPS should be showing?

Epic fail! Good luck M$ trying to sell QB on win store. Thank God they released Ori on steam. They fixed indie clause hurting the xbox one?

First try to compete with GOG, Origin, Uplay then think about Steam.

Hey Microsoft here. Our Microsoft store is great. It has the following awesome "features".

-No exclusive fullscreen option, which means...

-Can't turn off automatic Vsync on windowed borderless. This removes the ability to use silly things like Gsync, Freesync, Nvidia DSR, AMD VSR. Console can't do this so neither can you. Bet you feel dumb now right? With your fancy 1000 dollar monitor? See you should have bought an Xbox.

- No support for injectors (ReShade/SweetFX or similar). Like SMAA? Tough. You will use whatever blurry, broken or stupidly high performance cost AA we choose to give you so we can make our stupid console look good. Will probably be temporal like TXAA but worse so we can blur the @$%# out of those 6GB textures you will choose on 700 dollar graphics cards.

- No support for overlays (such as performance monitors, frame rate counters). Rivatuner worked too good at limiting FPS or setting a static FPS. We fixed this at MS. You can't use it.

- No way to add the game to Steam (no exe file), Yeah we said we were not in competition with Steam and loved Steam. We lied. That is what we do here at MS. We have lied about PC Gaming and to PC Gamers since before Vista.

- Can't tweak game files (ini changes or similar). Want to change and tweak things like view distance, or mipmaps, or make a game look better years from now? F that. You will take what we give you.

Oh and remember how DX 12 was supposed to lower CPU overhead? Well it does, but you ain't getting that. We will make our PC port a bloated, broken POS so our console looks better and then pay "games journalists" to say what a great value the XB1 is and how it is "built for DX 12". All while our console is basically a 1.7ghz AMD CPU with a GPU worse than a R9 260x. The console does not have to phone home your data to MS servers though while playing the game though, so this is expected. That is a "feature" of Windows 10. So please sell your soul to us and sign the Windows 10 EULA, so that you can play this game (we originally paid a third party publisher to keep from you in the first place) as Merry from Lord of the Rings in Quantum Break, a game from a company you PC Gamer's helped save with Alan Wake.

P.S. We can change the EULA you signed at any time and require secureboot in the future as a REQUIREMENT from OEM's (already doing that) and from all our customers. You do not own a OS, you own a service. BTW secureboot breaks all modding completely, so now our Windows Store doesn't look all that bad right? Oh and we engage in Astroturfing galore (illegal) and we will harass any criticism of our company by calling you names, group attacks and other shenanigans and that is just company policy that we have had as far back as internal documents that came to light in the Comes Vs Microsoft trial.

P.S.S. When sales are bad we will blame you and drop "support for PC Gaming" on all our big titles. We will have already got what we wanted. Windows 10 adoption. If this sounds familiar? We did the same thing with Windows Vista. We tried to charge you for Xbox Live (GFWL) back then though. We figured you suckers *cough* valued customers would not fall for that again.

-Your pals at MS. Xbox looks pretty good now huh? Please buy one.

Save us Vulkan API. You are our only hope.

I guess they learned nothing.

Sounds horrific....why handicap PC games?

@Juub1990 I do not understand why I cannot monitor my fps and such. If I didn't spend $9 for the game I'd probably be butthurt. Luckily, the game feels smooth, so I'm not worried about it. Also, why is no one talking about the atrocious download time when using the Windows store? It is so slow.

Not buying Quantum Break.

Oh wow, that sounds absolutely horrible.

Any consumer modification is prohibited and it's basically a closed platform like that...

Yea, it's completely shit and it's why I don't buy any games on it.

Course it sucks, just like the over priced QB X1 bundle.

I'm going to legally obtain this game anyway and if Microsoft does not fix these things by release, I'm going to wait for a pirated version with community fixes so I don't have to deal with this crap and still legally own it.

Tomb Raider has a perfectly fine functioning alternative via Steam so motivation is low, however with Quantum Break being isolated to the Windows 10 store, I assume crackers and modders will be motivated to tear this apart and fix all of this nonsense themselves.

How is it overpriced? It's $350, comes with the game, Alan Wake, all of its DLC and American Nightmare...

Windows store for soccer moms who fantasize about Fabio ravishing them on a Pirate boat.

Sadly, what PC gamers don't understand (and Phil Spencer has directly commented on), is they don't care about core PC gamers.

All this, Windows 10 PC gaming stuff, it's just a means to make Xbox a trojan horse. PC gamers, utterly desperate for validation, blinded, take it as "Ohhhh PC gamings great again!"

It ain't m8, it ain't.

Well, that's terrible.

Let's hope they do sth about it, since they desperately need this to work and gotta give it their best shot.

That's fucking stupid

That is because applications from the Windows Store are "Universal Windows Platform" (UWP) applications and not your traditional ".exe" applications.

Your third party applications haven't been updated to pick these applications up, so it is up to them to update them. Since AAA budget games are finally coming out on UWP, we might see Nvidia, AMD, everyone else update their drivers/programs soon. So you can't really just blame Microsoft for that since they announced the UWP program a while ago.

It really is bad and the amount of software available on it is a joke compared to Android/IOS. Even if you were to dismiss all the garbage on android and OSX store, it would still make Windows store look small and insignificant,

For MS who has the most popular software in the world with their OS's and Office, it's a wonder why their offerings are so shitty.

My co-worker couldn't use his new BB8 robot because the software wasn't available for ...Windows Mobile. To me that's an example of how far behind they are in the mobile market and getting developers on board to make their software for it or hell, even to port it over.

I've had a previous Windows phone from 5-6 years ago, then an Iphone and right now a Note 5. I wouldn't mind going back to Windows because of the eco system with X1/360 and Live, but not with the way the software is currently. Not to mention the few Windows 7phone options that are out for each carrier.

Windows Phone does have the app to control the BB8 Robot. Link

hmm, he said they didn't at the time he got it, maybe it just came out, otherwise it sucks for him because he sold it..lol

It will flop like a fish, just like GFWL did

So Nydac is saying Vsync doesn't work but in the list evil posted its always on.

So which is it.

And like I said....this is only the beginning.

Yeah I really like Windows Phone's UI. And I can see a lot of possibilities when both PCs, Xboxes and Phones use the same OS.

But the lack of software on WP is pretty terrible. Can't even get ********* snapchat on it.

So Windows Store basically turns your expensive PC into an Xbox One or.... worse?

Yep, sounds like MS. Complete clowns at every imaginable level.

Surprised they don't lock the frame rate to 30FPS and the resolution to 900p

I don't play a single game without sweetfx and it doesn't support it? What a joke

Well duh, it was made by microsoft.

I wonder how microsoft plans to **** up PC gaming from now on and how herms will react. Will be interesting to see.

They really blew it. Who are they even targetting with this? People who want ease of use over quality will go for consoles, so this shit is going nowhere.

I'm just glad Rise of the Tomb Raider wasn't exclusive to this crap. Going to have to pass on Quantum Break. Shame.

I agree with the horrific sound. absolutely horrific

Have you tried re-running the overlay app after the game has loaded? Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, not.

I still have the original Microsoft Flight Simulator X. Bandicam also quit working after I moved to Windows 10. But, if I re-run Bandicam after FSX has loaded, it'll run for a while and then quit. Then I have to re-run it again.

This was taken while I was testing Windows 10 last year. I had to re-run Bandicam a few times.

Hopefully crackers find a way to make it work without it.

No wonder piracy is rampant in some games when buying the game makes you jump through so many hoops to use it while also denying the support of certain software like sweetfx.

Pirates just have to click on the .exe file and they are in the game.

Unfortunately, I don't think any crackers or modders can do anything about this. These games are built from scratch as universal apps, effectively "modern" apps built for the Windows Store that are designed to rely on the nasty app container that runs them, isolated from every other process.

Pirates might pirate it eventually, but the negatives of this format will remain even then.

It boggles my mind that these are called "modern" apps when they kill a lot of functionality provided by traditional Win32 programs.

A first glimpse of the Denuvo-future?

Or just a dumb mistake?

GFWL 2.0?

Yep, best just to get'em from Home Depot. :P

Windows 10 store is a walled garden for your PC games. It runs your games in an environment that gives control to Microsoft on hardware that you own, with software that you bought.

It's not consumer-friendly, it stinks of GFWL, and I have no plans to make any purchases from it.

I have gsync monitor for a reason and I very much like mods and sweet fx

Hope this gets better if they want people to use the store

Welcome to the future of PC gaming

Are y'all really that shocked? Kind of when battlefield became unmoddable a few years ago

Console ecosystem

Both the Steam and Windows Store versions of ROTTR has Denuvo. The Steam version doesn't have any of these problems. This is all Windows Store's handiwork. Denuvo only protects against modifying the code, so it has nothing to do with these restrictions.
And no, it's not a mistake by any means. This is something Microsoft is doing intentionally. Why, I have no idea.

Yeah I know that Windows Store =/= a monopoly to DRM, I'm just voicing my concern that publishers may lock their files behind closed doors and prevent modding and unofficial patches using these kind of methods once they think that we cannot pirate their games. Right now a publisher can't even dream of having absolute control over our products. I don't want things like this to become standard. Probably I'm overly concerned about it because gamers have shown time and again that when companies cross lines we can stop them.

an unlikely reality, what publisher will release on windows store over steam and other competition where sales would be much higher? we will likely only ever see MS/XBOX related games forced on the windows store... luckily a great game like Tomb Raider dodged the bullet this time... but tbh XBOX don't make many good unique games anyway...

I will admit that I was oblivious to most of these issues as I don't really use the Windows Store for anything. They are all valid concerns that should be addressed. Windows Store will not be a valid storefront for games if changes are not made. I will never buy any third party game from it unless changes are made.

You say this as if its news or something

It's not so much that MIcrosoft set out with the intention of messing with SLI and Fraps, it's more the nature of UWP programs. UWP apps operate very differently than Win32 apps, and use different api sets. UWA apps are sandboxed, meaning they are kept isolated from everything else; sorta running in their own little virtual machine. That is what makes it so hard for older overlay and recording programs to work with UWP apps. They aren't designed for it. Overlay and recording programs do have the capability to work with UWP apps, as evidenced by the xbox app, though i'm unsure if MS gives that app api access that is not publicly available to third parties.

Same thing with SLI/Crossfire and injectables, the apps being sandboxed makes it incompatible with the older style SLI and injection methods. Multi-GPU systems can work with UWP apps but it works differently than a win32 app. Injectables and generic file modding is unlikely to work on UWP apps without cracking, due to the nature of sandboxed apps. Modding support will generally rely on the developer allowing it.

Currently, UWP apps have to be sold through the MS store, other storefronts don't have the capability do deal with them. Even if they could, a UWP app on Steam would still have the exact same limitations.

If you are wondering why Rise of the Tomb Raider was on both Steam and the Windows Store, that is because RoTR was not a Universal app. It was a Win32 app that was ported over to a Universal app using Microsoft's Project Centennial. Games like Quantum Break and Fable Legends were UWP apps from the start, so there is no legacy Win32 app to plop on Steam.