I buy the games because they're good, somehow, i believe that the only reason game developers make games using directX is because they're afraid of going out of business, like you say, windows is the main platform for gamers and due to the extremely bad openGL support from Microsoft I must say that It feels somewhat scary to make games using openGL.

I would stop whining if it wasn't so obvious that Microsoft is going for Monopoly.
I do not see the good things in letting Microsoft getting total control.

Old games often have a small [PC GAME] label somewhere on the back or at the bottom of the box. I'm not saying I like it when other people display their logos in huge ass text on their products, I'm more than ok with information about what it needs to run existing on the bottom or on newer boxed at the back. Windows 95 or 98 can be read at most of my boxes, with small text on the side or in the requirements section.
A HUGE logo on the front is clearly there for commercial purposes.

[quote ]Seriously? What other console developer has released a free kit that will let you make games as an independent developer for their console? Not to mention that the code is cross-platform from xbox to windows, and soon to the zune.
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How can you use cross-platform support as an argument to defend windows? Microsoft is really good at doing business, they're not focusing on making their products better, they realize that there are more profitable ways of doing business . Both Playstation 3 and Wii supports OpenGL.

Gah! this thread is so depressing .

You are buying games and supporting the developers who chose to use DirectX. Microsoft doesn't provide OpenGL support at all, unless you are using basic video drivers from them. OpenGL/DirectX support is provided by the video card drivers you install.

And yet their SDK/API is closed, so a real lot of good that does. I think an open SDK like XNA is more valuable than wether or not it uses OpenGL under it's skin.

Well, any serious gamer gets their driver fix from the vendor, not Microsoft anyway.

I don't entirely understand what you mean, but, what?!?!
You're not allowed to run code that you've written on a device that you've purchased?
They consider it a security risk to allow people to write their own programs in a powerful language?

I have a question.. if C++ can't be used for developing xbox 360 games how come large developers can? What makes the xbox think: "Here's some C++ code, It's by an large developer so it can pass" If there is a way to play C++ games on the console shouldn't people be able to by-pass the security checks somehow? Also.. are you saying the current copy protection is impossible to break?

While their actions makes some sense in regards to their words i think this is another reason: "We want people to use C#".

There are a variety of ways to do this, some of which rely on crytographic solutions, some on trademark law and some on disc format.

Re: cryptographics, you can use clever maths so that the XBox 360 knows how to decode part of a disc to look for a particular series of numbers, but a person having knowledge of the drecryption method and the series of numbers doesn't have enough information to know how to encrypt other numbers. It's a similar principle to the way that something like RSA can be used so that your computer knows how to encrypt your credit card details but another computer inbetween that also captured the information on how to encrypt can't work out how to decrypt in a reasonable amount of time. What's more, the machine can be set up so that if any part of the rest of the disc changes then it looks for different numbers. So you can't just copy someone else's. Then Microsoft know how to produce the numbers that allow a particular program to run but no-one else does. See digital signing for a probably better explanation.

Re: trademarks, Microsoft can have the machine check a certain part of the disc for a trademark they own. If anyone else produces a disc which reproduces that trademark then Microsoft can sue them in trademark law. This is used to prevent unlicensed copying.

Re: disc format, it's possible to manufacture discs that aren't like the discs a normal DVD burner would produce. The hardware will only play the game if the discs match this alternative spec. The specific schemes I'm aware of from previous years include:

• in Atari/Amiga land, you could write data so that it was written, e.g., 10% more densely than the drives on normal machines would write it. The machines would still read these discs because they were within the acceptable timing tolerances. Code could time the loading and refuse to work if it took longer than expected — because that would probably mean that the disc had been duplicated.

• in the PSOne world, Sony would deliberately write bad sectors in certain places, malformed in certain deliberate ways. Because CD burners can't normally be told to deliberately produce bad sectors, burning an ISO doesn't generally work.

• the Saturn has an even more elaborate system that, to my knowledge, has not yet been fully decoded. The outer rim of the date side of Saturn discs has a pattern that makes a copyright message to the human eye. Something in that pattern is used by the machine to determine if it is an original disc — though there doesn't seem to be consensus on whether data is hidden in the pattern or if the drive laser is actually used to do a sort of image scan.

Sure it has been "hacked". Well, AFAIK its just really bypassing the security checks by modding the box with a chip.