So uh Tim Sweeney, the head of Epic Games (and makers of Gears of War) recently posted a lengthy opinion piece on The Guardian taking Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform to task. And then some! With the title of the piece being "Microsoft wants to monopolise games development on PC. We must fight it", you can be sure it painted Microsoft's Windows 10-led push for UWP and Universal Windows Applications in a negative light.

For those unaware, basically the whole UWP shift by Microsoft is to unify Windows 10 devices and ensure that any app or game developed using this new platform could potentially run on any Windows 10 device. The recent announcement of Forza 6 coming to PC is the direct result of that game's core engine being ported over to UWP, ensuring that all future Forza titles could be released on both Windows 10 and Xbox One (which is slowly transforming into a Windows 10 games-specific device). That's the general idea.

And hey, on paper this kind of sounds sounds okay. Microsoft actively supporting the PC as a gaming platform. So, what's the problemo Tim? What's got you all up in a huff?

Microsoft is moving against the entire PC industry – including consumers (and gamers in particular), software developers such as Epic Games, publishers like EA and Activision, and distributors like Valve and Good Old Games.

Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP, and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem. They’re curtailing users’ freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers.

Yikes. So this would mean that publishers and developers would be beholden to Microsoft's ecosystem, which includes the terrible Windows Store. And by terrible we mean that it's essentially a re-skin of the Apple or Google storefront, filled to the brim with garbage. And almost completely closed-off.

The specific problem here is that Microsoft’s shiny new “Universal Windows Platform” is locked down, and by default it’s impossible to download UWP apps from the websites of publishers and developers, to install them, update them, and conduct commerce in them outside of the Windows Store.

If UWP is to gain the support of major PC game and application developers, it must be as open a platform as today’s predominant win32 API, which is used by all major PC games and applications.

Tim Sweeney is definitely passionate about the whole issue, and you can read the entire piece here. In response Microsoft's corporate vice president issued the following statement to The Guardian,

The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX required.

We want to make Windows the best development platform regardless of technologies used, and offer tools to help developers with existing code bases of HTML/JavaScript, .NET and Win32, C+ + and Objective-C bring their code to Windows, and integrate UWP capabilities. With Xamarin, UWP developers can not only reach all Windows 10 devices, but they can now use a large percentage of their C# code to deliver a fully native mobile app experiences for iOS and Android. We also posted a blog on our development tools recently.

Wait, what? That's almost the direct opposite of what Tim Sweeney detailed in his original piece. Which begs the question, who are we to believe? Head of Xbox and all things Microsoft and gaming, Phil Spencer took to Twitter to offer his feedback and stated that the company will have more to reveal about its plans for UWP later this month.

UWP is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, and can be supported by any store. Broad range of tools https://t.co/LqPcjRFzu9

— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) March 4, 2016

Tim Sweeney, who is a friend of Phil Spencer responded in the best way possible. For a technical gaming nerd/god Level 99 wizard,

I like the sound of this, and look forward to thorough technical details on UWP's planned openness at //build. https://t.co/9oitPe3DuM

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) March 4, 2016

Thorough technical details, the only way to separate PR-speak from the truth.