Windows 8 a 'giant sadness' says gaming boss

[karl]

Newell, whose company is known for the Half-Life game series and runs the Steam games store, said Windows 8, the new Microsoft operating system, was "unusable".
"Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business," Newell told The Verge. "Rather than everybody being all excited to go buy a new PC, buying new software to run on it, we’ve had a 20-plus per cent decline in PC sales."
Before founding Valve, in 1996, Newell spent 13 years working on Windows for Microsoft.

See full story here:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/9791595/Windows-8-a-giant-sadness-says-gaming-boss.html

[TigerBoy]

Here is a really good refutation (http://gizmodo.com/5937590/youre-being-lied-to-windows-8-isnt-bad-for-gaming)for Newell. Bear in mind that the big issue here is that Win8 initially was going to lock steam out altogether, but has in any case moved in on their territory of software distribution with the Store offering games in a similar way to Steam. Steam also announced they were planning on selling non-games software, so clearly they're very invested in this clash.

Steam's own hardware survey released before Christmas showed Windows 8 growth was stronger than others.

In my view, so long as the games run well and Microsoft don't lock out 3rd parties like steam or do anything to discourage game makers or other OEMs there is no problem.

Given the economic times, I wonder how much of PC sales is actually to do with Windows 8, and how much to do with people's wallets. OS-only purchases don't seem attractive when Windows 7 works perfectly well: they saw this same factor hit vista sales. As a consumer I've been saving up to replace my graphics card, whereas buying a new OS at this point only offers me the pain & risk of upgrading for no tangible benefit for my gaming experience.