If you have some pals who play ARK: Survival Evolved on the Xbox One and you'd love to play with them, you're in luck, as you can now play the game cross-platform on your PC. The only catch is that you have to buy the game through the Windows Store to make it happen.
Microsoft's Windows 10 introduced a new app store to the world, as if it needed one, called the Windows Store. Exclusive to the OS and in the case of the stripped back version of the operating system (Windows 10 S) the only way you could buy and install applications, it's hardly proved the most popular route for acquiring applications. That goes doubly so for games, as it is far from the cheapest option most of the time.
Indeed ARK is currently $60 on there and just $23 on Steam.
However, Microsoft does offer one unique feature on it, as PCGamesN points out, that it hopes will draw gamers in and that's cross-platform play with Xbox gamers. ARK: Survival Evolved is just the latest game to join that select club and it could be a way to bring a few PC gamers to Microsoft's store.
The only problem with it is that there isn't seamless play with existing Steam gamers, so once again we're splitting the ecosystem, even if it's not quite as hard a split as typical console/PC setups. Even the Xbox integration isn't perfect. You need to find a specific cross-platform server to play on, which further divides the market.
What do you guys think of this feature? Is it worth it for the added cost and (in)convenience?
