Xbox players are growing increasingly frustrated at being forced to play against PC gamers. While crossplay was initially a popular request from Xbox and PC players that Microsoft has backed strongly for years, those playing first-person shooters on Xbox are struggling to opt out of the experience to avoid PC cheaters. From a report: Games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Halo Infinite force Xbox players to match against PC gamers in a variety of playlists. You don't have to look very far to see why people are angry about it. "Now that cheating in Halo is confirmed on PC, can we have to option to opt out of cross-play?" asked one Reddit post in November, just weeks after the multiplayer version of Halo Infinite launched. "Forced crossplay is a scam by Microsoft," reads another post in Microsoft's Halo Waypoint forums. "Forced crossplay is a mistake," says another Redditor, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

Halo Infinite and Call of Duty: Warzone are both suffering from an influx of cheating, largely because they're free-to-play titles so it's easy for hackers to create a new account following a ban. While there's an option to disable crossplay in Warzone, if you try to load into a playlist on Xbox it will ask you to re-enable it. Whereas on PlayStation you can simply dismiss the prompt and continue to the playlist with crossplay still disabled. Warzone players on Xbox have been complaining about this forced crossplay for more than a year, with various forum posts and YouTube videos highlighting how irritating it is to be forced into crossplay. Most of the issues are related to PC cheaters, who have plagued Warzone for years before Activision finally added a new anti-cheat system in October with a kernel-level driver to catch PC cheaters. Now that cheaters are already ruining Halo Infinite multiplayer games, the call to remove forced crossplay is certainly growing louder.

In November 2020, Microsoft took the wraps off its Pluton security chip, with the goal of bringing it to all Windows 10 PCs. It wasn't until this week, that any of Microsoft's OEMs announced their first Pluton-powered PCs. From a report: At CES, Lenovo unveiled its Ryzen-6000-based ThinkPad Z series laptops running Windows 11, which will integrate the Microsoft Pluton processor. The coming ThinkPad Z series laptops will begin shipping in May 2022. Thanks to Pluton, these devices will be able to receive updated firmware using Windows Update. In the ThinkPad Z13 and Z16, Pluton will help protect Windows Hello credentials, according to Microsoft, by further isolating them from attackers. These new ThinkPads will use Pluton as their TPMs to protect encryption keys from physical attacks, Microsoft officials said. Microsoft pioneered Pluton first in Azure Sphere, its Linux-based microcontroller, and in Xbox. In a January 4 blog post, Microsoft officials noted that Pluton can be configured in three ways: As the Trusted Platform Module (TPM); as a security processor for non-TPM scenarios like platform resiliency; or inside a device where OEMs have opted to ship with the chip turned off.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The HDMI standards are a mess. HDMI 2.1, in particular, is a uniquely frustrating mess, with haphazard support among TV manufacturers, cable makers, and devices that make setting up, say 120Hz gaming on a PS5 or Xbox Series X a uniquely harrowing experience. Fortunately, the HDMI Forum is swooping in ahead of CES with its latest revision to the HDMI specification stack, HDMI 2.1a, which is here to make everything better and simpler... I'm kidding, of course. It's gonna make things more complicated. It's a new HDMI standard, what on earth did you expect?

Let's start with the good: HDMI 2.1a is an upcoming revision to the HDMI 2.1 stack and adds a major new feature, Source-Based Tone Mapping, or SBTM. SBTM is a new HDR feature that offloads some of the HDR tone mapping to the content source (like your computer or set-top box) alongside the tone mapping that your TV or monitor is doing. SBTM isn't a new HDR standard -- it's not here to replace HDR10 or Dolby Vision. Instead, it's intended to help existing HDR setups work better by letting the content source better optimize the content it passes to the display or by removing the need to have the user manually calibrate their screens for HDR by having the source device configure content for the specific display. Other use cases could be for when there's a mix of content types, like for streamers (who could have an HDR game playing alongside a window of black and white text), displaying each area of content.

Covid-19's knock-on effects have delayed development so much that most games we thought we'd be playing now have drifted into next year. From a report: I'm Keza MacDonald, the Guardian's video games editor. I have been a video games journalist for 16 years, and my extended family only recently stopped asking me when I was going to get a real job over Christmas dinner. I guess they've given up on me now. This December, as usual, the release calendar has been as sparse as the hairs on Agent 47's head. Last year we at least had Cyberpunk 2077's fiasco of a launch to distract us from the end-of-2020 doldrums; you can only hope that it will fare better when the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions are, finally, released in the spring. On the plus side, right now there is actually time to catch up on things without the distraction of shiny new things coming out every week. Absorbing myself in a video game has always been a good way to stave off end-of-year ennui in the festive perineum between Christmas and New Year's Eve.

Those Christmas games loom large in the memory -- one year it was Mass Effect 2, which I played for days straight wrapped in a duvet in my freezing cold Edinburgh flat; one Christmas as a teenager I persuaded my parents to get me Animal Crossing on US import and spent the subsequent days completely ignoring my family in favour of my new weird animal neighbours. (I've got my own kids now, and last year I did the same in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Some things don't change.) It's been a strange year for games, partly because the knock-on effects of Covid-19 have delayed the process of game development so much that most of the things we thought we'd be playing now have drifted into next year. Game development is an extraordinarily collaborative endeavour, especially when there are 100 or more people on a team, and working from home has slowed things down massively at a lot of studios with whom I've spoken.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Four years running, we've been jazzed by the potential of HDMI 2.1 -- the relatively new video connector standard that can provide variable refresh rates (VRR), automatic low latency connections (ALLM), and of course, a giant pipe with 48Gbps of bandwidth (and fixed rate signaling) to deliver up to 10K resolution and up to a 120Hz refresh rate depending on your cable and compression. But today, I'm learning that not only are all of those features technically optional, but that the HDMI standards body owner actually encourages TV and monitor manufacturers that have none of those things -- zip, zilch, zero -- to effectively lie and call them "HDMI 2.1" anyhow. That's the word from TFTCentral, which confronted the HDMI Licensing Administrator with the news that Xiaomi was selling an "HDMI 2.1" monitor that supported no HDMI 2.1 features, and was told this was a perfectly reasonable state of affairs. It's infuriating.

It means countless people, some of whom we've encouraged in our reviews to seek out HDMI 2.1 products, may get fooled into fake futureproofing if they don't look at the fine print to see whether features like ALLM, VRR, or even high refresh rates are possible. Worse, they'll get fooled for no particularly good reason: there was a perfectly good version of HDMI without those features called HDMI 2.0, but the HDMI Licensing Administrator decided to kill off that brand when it introduced the new one. Very little of this is actually news, I'm seeing -- we technically should have known that HDMI 2.1's marquee features would be optional for a while now, and here at The Verge we've seen many a TV ship without full support. In one story about shopping for the best gaming TV for PS5 and Xbox Series X, we characterized it as "early growing pains."

This year's Game Awards also saw the premiere of The Matrix Awakens, a new in-world "tech demonstrator" written by Lana Wachowski, the co-writer/director of the original Matrix trilogy and director of the upcoming sequel. It's available free on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, reports the Verge, and they also scored a sit-down video interview with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss about the new playable experience — and the new Matrix movie: Reeves also revealed that he thinks there should be a modern Matrix video game, that he's flattered by Cyberpunk 2077 players modding the game to have sex with his character, and why he thinks Facebook shouldn't co-opt the metaverse.

Apart from serving as a clever promotion vehicle for the new Matrix movie premiering December 22nd, The Matrix Awakens is designed to showcase what's possible with the next major version of Epic's Unreal Engine coming next year. It's structured as a scripted intro by Wachowski, followed by a playable car chase scene and then an open-world sandbox experience you can navigate as one of Epic's metahuman characters. A big reason for doing the demo is to demonstrate how Epic thinks its technology can be used to blend scripted storytelling with games and much more, according to Epic CTO Kim Libreri, who worked on the special effects for the original Matrix trilogy...

Everything in the virtual city is fully loaded no matter where your character is located (rather than rendered only when the character gets near), down to the detail of a chain link fence in an alley. All of the moving vehicles, people, and lighting in the city are generated by AI, the latter of which Libreri describes as a breakthrough that means lighting is no longer "this sort of niche art form." Thanks to updates coming to Unreal Engine, which powers everything from Fortnite to special effects in Disney's The Mandalorian, developers will be able to use the same, hyper-realistic virtual assets across different experiences. It's part of Epic's goal to help build the metaverse.
Elsewhere the site writes that The Matrix Awakens "single-handedly proves next-gen graphics are within reach of Sony and Microsoft's new game consoles." It's unlike any tech demo you've ever tried before. When we said the next generation of gaming didn't actually arrive with Xbox Series X and PS5, this is the kind of push that has the potential to turn that around....

Just don't expect it to make you question your reality — the uncanny valley is still alive and well.... But from a "is it time for photorealistic video game cities?" perspective, The Matrix Awakens is seriously convincing. It's head-and-shoulders above the most photorealistic video game cities we've seen so far, including those in the Spider-Man, Grand Theft Auto and Watch Dogs series... Despite glitches and an occasionally choppy framerate, The Matrix Awakens city feels more real, thanks to Unreal Engine's incredible global illumination and real-time raytracing ("The entire world is lit by only the sun, sky and emissive materials on meshes," claims Epic), the detail of the procedurally generated buildings, and how dense it all is in terms of cars and foot traffic.

And the most convincing part is that it's not just a scripted sequence running in real-time on your PS5 or Xbox like practically every other tech demo you've seen — you get to run, drive, and fly through it, manipulate the angle of the sun, turn on filters, and dive into a full photo mode, as soon as the scripted and on-rails shooter parts of the demo are done. Not that there's a lot to do in The Matrix Awakens except finding different ways to take in the view. You can't land on buildings, there's no car chases except for the scripted one, no bullets to dodge. You can crash any one of the game's 38,146 drivable cars into any of the other cars or walls, I guess. I did a bunch of that before I got bored, though, just taking in the world.... Almost 10 million unique and duplicated assets were created to make the city....

Epic Games' pitch is that Unreal Engine 5 developers can do this or better with its ready-made tools at their disposal, and I can't wait to see them try.

Private emails show Microsoft wheeling and dealing to get into the App Store. From a report: Remember when Apple pretended like it would let cloud gaming services like Microsoft xCloud and Google Stadia into the App Store, while effectively tearing their business models to shreds? Know how Microsoft replied that forcing gamers to download hundreds of individual apps to play a catalog of cloud games would be a bad experience? In reality, Microsoft was willing to play along with many of Apple's demands -- and it even offered to bring triple-A, Xbox-exclusive games to iPhone to help sweeten the deal. That's according to a new set of private emails that The Verge unearthed in the aftermath of the Epic v. Apple trial.

These games would have run on Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) platform, streaming from remote server farms filled with Xbox One and Xbox Series X processors instead of relying on the local processing power of your phone. If the deal had been made, you could have theoretically bought a copy of a game like Halo Infinite in Apple's App Store itself and launched it like any other app -- instead of having to pay $14.99 a month for an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription with a set catalog of games and then needing to use Microsoft's web-based App Store workaround. But primarily, Microsoft was negotiating to bring its Netflix-esque catalog of xCloud games to the App Store, at a time when Apple had gotten very touchy about cloud gaming in general.

The emails, between Microsoft Xbox head of business development Lori Wright and several key members of Apple's App Store teams, show that Microsoft did start with a wide array of concerns about stuffing an entire service worth of Xbox games into individual App Store apps as of February 2020. Wright mentioned the "Complexity & management of creating hundreds to thousands of apps," how they'd have to update every one of those apps to fix any bugs, and how all those app icons could lead to cluttered iOS homescreens, among other worries.

Ars Technica reports: Months after the first-person-shooter classic Quake got a major 25th anniversary re-release, its modern handlers have returned with an update that exceeds all expectations. Thursday's new 770MB patch on all platforms (Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC) adds an entirely new co-op combat mode, and it officially opens the game's mod floodgates for players outside the PC ecosystem.

The uncreatively named "Horde" mode works much like a mode of the same name in Gears of War. Instead of progressing through a level from start to finish, players are expected to hunker down inside a somewhat circular arena and then contend with hundreds of enemies spawning from all sides. Kill a full "wave" of foes, and your team will get a moment to breathe, replenish health and ammo (or argue over who gets to use it), and do it all over again.

For the sake of Quake's first-ever official co-op mode (beyond the campaign, which always supported co-op as an option), Bethesda support studio MachineGames has whipped up four brand-new battling arenas, which are pictured above. Each includes at least one "silver key" door, which is full of more powerful weapons and is gated until players earn a key by defeating a tougher "boss wave" of foes. Get through nine enemy waves, and your team gets a "gold key." You can either exit the level at that point or stay and keep fighting increasingly tough foes until your team dies.
In addition, Quake now has a new "add-on" menu, and this week's patch gives it an option for playing the foggy 2012 Quake mod "Honey."

Sony Group's PlayStation division is planning a new subscription service to compete with rival Microsoft's popular Xbox Game Pass, according to people familiar with Sony's plans and documents reviewed. Blooomberg: The service, code-named Spartacus, will allow PlayStation owners to pay a monthly fee for access to a catalog of modern and classic games, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak to the press about the plans. The offering will likely be available on the smash hit PlayStation 4, which has sold more than 116 million units, and its elusive successor, the PlayStation 5, which launched more than a year ago but is still difficult to buy due to supply chain issues.

When it launches, expected in the spring, the service will merge Sony's two existing subscription plans, PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now. Currently, PlayStation Plus is required for most online multiplayer games and offers free monthly titles, while PlayStation Now allows users to stream or download older games. Documents reviewed by Bloomberg suggest that Sony plans to retain the PlayStation Plus branding but phase out PlayStation Now.

Microsoft's $300 Xbox Series S was the most popular console during Black Friday, it's been claimed. From a report: According to Adobe's Digital Economy Index data, the cheaper Series S outsold both PS5, Switch OLED Model and the more expensive Xbox Series X during the biggest holiday sale day of the year. Adobe claims its data comes from analysing 1 trillion visits to retail sites, in addition to surveying over 1,000 retailers on their most popular items. If accurate, a key element of Series S's popularity is likely that, unlike the highly sought-after PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, Series S has been widely available to purchase during Black Friday week. At the time of publishing, it's still in stock at many retailers.

A year ago, the next generation of console gaming was supposed to have arrived. The Xbox Series X (and Series S) and PlayStation 5 strode boldly onto the scene, with massive chassis and even bigger promises of games with better graphics, shorter loading times, and revolutionary new breakthroughs. But a year in, and that next generation of gaming has yet to arrive. From a report: There are still too few consoles, and more importantly, too few games that truly take advantage of them, leaving the first year of the PS5 and Xbox Series X more of a beta test for the lucky few who have been able to get ahold of one, rather than the proper start of a new era of gaming.

A complicated mess of factors have led to the next-gen bottleneck. The physical consoles themselves are still nigh-impossible to buy, which naturally limits the number of customers who own them and can buy games for them. That in turn means that there's little incentive for developers to aim for exclusive next-gen titles that truly harness the power of the PS5 or Xbox Series X. Why limit yourself (and your sales) to the handful of next-gen console owners when there are millions of Xbox One and PS4 customers to whom you can sell copies of games? Adding to the mess has been the fact that industry-wide delays (many of which are due to similar pandemic-related issues as the broader supply chain problems) have also seen tons of next-gen optimized or exclusive games moved out to 2022 and beyond. Meaning even if you can get ahold of a console, there are still relatively few blockbuster titles to actually play on them.

Microsoft's head of Xbox said he's "evaluating all aspects of our relationship with Activision Blizzard and making ongoing proactive adjustments," in light of the recent revelations at the video game publisher. From a report: In an email to staff seen by Bloomberg News, Phil Spencer said he and the gaming leadership team are "disturbed and deeply troubled by the horrific events and actions" at Activision Blizzard. He referred to the Wall Street Journal story earlier this week that said Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick knew of sexual harassment at the company for years and that he mistreated women.

"This type of behavior has no place in our industry," Spencer wrote. He joins a swell of outcry from employees to investors and shareholders in demanding a stronger response from the U.S.'s second-biggest gaming publisher. On Wednesday, Sony Group's PlayStation Chief Jim Ryan sent a similar note to staff, writing that he and his leadership were "disheartened and frankly stunned to read" that Activision "has not done enough to address a deep-seated culture of discrimination and harassment."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Microsoft's vice president of gaming, Phil Spencer, wants the gaming industry to work toward a common goal of keeping older games available to modern audiences through emulation, he tells Axios. Emulation allows modern hardware to simulate the functions of older hardware and run game files, or executables. "My hope (and I think I have to present it that way as of now) is as an industry we'd work on legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run any (within reason) older executable allowing someone to play any game," he wrote in a direct message. Microsoft's newer consoles -- the Xbox Series and Xbox One -- run huge libraries of older Xbox 360 and original Xbox games using this technique.

Emulators are most commonly used worldwide by fans, preservationists and pirates. They run games from the original Nintendo era to more recent PlayStations, but there is no consistent use of them by the industry. [...] An official industry emulation approach would require long-term online support to offer game files and to possibly check if the user has the right to access them. Spencer, whose own platform has some of these issues, still sees a path forward. "I think in the end, if we said, 'Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,' that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry."

Following a limited test in September, Microsoft has begun rolling out cloud gaming support to additional Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S consoles. Engadget reports: While the feature is still in beta, it's now available to select Xbox console owners in 25 markets. Over the coming weeks, the company plans to scale the service to all Xbox systems in those regions. As before, you'll need a Game Pass Ultimate subscription to use the service, but it's no longer necessary to take part in the Alpha Skip-Ahead and Alpha Insider programs.

Microsoft envisions a handful of scenarios where the ability to stream a game will be helpful. To start, it's a way for people to try a Game Pass title without downloading it first. In much the same way, it also allows you to jump into a multiplayer game with your friends, even if you don't have that title installed. Lastly, for Xbox One owners, it's a chance to play Xbox Series X/S titles like The Medium and The Riftbreaker.

Long-time tlhIngan writes: Tim Sweeney is at it again. The CEO of Epic Games blasts Apple and Google and calls for a universal app store that works across all platforms. Naturally, he's proposing that Epic Games manage the store across iOS, Android, Xbox, PC, Nintendo and Sony. Bloomberg (paywalled) has more details. "What the world really needs now is a single store that works with all platforms," said Sweeney in an interview at the Global Conference for Mobile Application Ecosystem Fairness in Seoul, South Korea. "Right now software ownership is fragmented between the iOS App Store, the Android Google Play marketplace, different stores on Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch, and then Microsoft Store and the Mac App Store." Sweeney added that Epic Games is working with developers and service providers to create a system to allow users "to buy software in one place, knowing that they'd have it on all devices and all platforms."

"There's a store market, there's a payments market, and there are many other related markets. And it's critical that antitrust enforcement not allow a monopolist in one market to use their control of that market to impose control over unrelated markets." He went on to accuse Apple of complying "with oppressive foreign laws" while "ignoring laws passed by Korea's democracy." "Apple must be stopped," he says.

During the Xbox 20th anniversary event today, Microsoft announced it'll be adding a total of 76 games to the Xbox backward compatibility program. The company also said "Halo Infinite," the latest edition of the best-selling Xbox alien-shooter game, will be available starting today for multiplayer gaming. Engadget reports: Every title Microsoft is adding today will support Auto HDR on Xbox Series X and Series S consoles. You'll also see an increase in resolution when playing original Xbox games. The Xbox Series X and Xbox One X will render those titles at four times their native resolution, while the Xbox Series S will do so at three times and Xbox One S and Xbox One at double. Additionally, 11 titles will support FPS Boost. The feature increases the framerate of a game up to 60 frames per second. 26 titles that were already a part of the backward compatibility library will now support FPS Boost as well. Included in that list are Fallout: New Vegas, The Elder Scrolls IV, Dragon Age: Origins and Dead Space 2. Some of the newly added backward compatible games include the entire Max Payne series and F.E.A.R. franchise, as well as Skate 2 and Star Wars: Jedi Knight II. Microsoft notes that this is the final update for the initiative.

"While we continue to stay focused on preserving and enhancing the art form of games, we have reached the limit of our ability to bring new games to the catalog from the past due to licensing, legal and technical constraints," Xbox Compatibility Program Lead Peggy Lo said.

Microsoft said "Halo Infinite," the latest edition of the best-selling Xbox alien-shooter game, will be available starting Nov. 15 for multiplayer gaming. From a report: The company, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the release of the original Xbox console and the first Halo game, said the first season of the game's multiplayer mode will begin Monday with a public test version on personal computers and consoles.

Roblox plans to help bring educational videogames to classrooms world-wide, part of its strategy to expand its mostly teen and preteen user base and play a role in the next evolution of the internet known as the metaverse. From a report: Roblox, based in San Mateo, Calif., is expected to announce Monday that it has invested $10 million to help develop three games for middle-school, high-school and college students. Roblox, which is on mobile devices, computers and Microsoft's Xbox system, had more than 47 million daily users in the third quarter, about half of whom are under the age of 13.

"It's been a vision since we started the company over 16 years ago to have these types of experiences," Roblox Chief Executive David Baszucki told The Wall Street Journal. "We've always had that educational background in mind." One of the games the company is funding will teach robotics, another will focus on space exploration, and the third will help students explore careers and concepts in computer science, engineering and biomedical science. They were developed by nonprofits including Boston's Museum of Science, and one was made in partnership with a small educational game studio. Roblox's platform already features millions of games and other activities, all of which are made by its own users, though only a few were designed for classrooms. The three games it is funding, due out next year, won't offer any virtual goods for sale.

Kotaku reports: Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition was released on November 11 on all major platforms including the Switch. However, for folks who bought the game on PC, they've been unable to play the game since just shortly after it was released. Now three days later, [PC] fans are still unable to access the game they bought days ago with no update from Rockstar on when the GTA Trilogy will become playable again.

The remastered Grand Theft Auto trilogy has had a very, very rocky launch, with players across all platforms reporting various graphical bugs, gameplay glitches, and other annoying changes and tweaks to the classic PS2-era games. But while players on Xbox One or PS5 or Switch are dealing with annoying bugs and odd visual problems, players on PC are left unable to play any of the games included in the collection.
In a review Screen Rant writes that all three games "look better here than they ever have before." But... The visual improvements don't discount the fact that there are a lot of things missing in Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition, including basic functions like the series' iconic cinematic camera mode which premiered in GTA 3. Gone also from GTA 3 is the top-down camera angle which was added in to please players coming over from GTA 2. Both of these camera angles were also missing in previous re-releases of GTA 3, but not including them in what is called the Definitive Edition feels like a mistake.
On the plus side, they write that "Some new but fun inclusions also make returning to Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas enjoyable, like San Andreas' updated bridge facts or the new cheat which lets players turn on Big Head Mode in all GTA Trilogy games if they enter the Konami code. The ability to instantly restart missions after being killed, busted, or otherwise failing is also much appreciated."

But Eurogamer reports that unhappy fans are now review-bombing the newly-released game on Metacritic: At the time of writing, the trilogy has 2000+ user reviews on the aggregate site. Of the 2054 reviews recorded by PC users on Metacritic, the combined score is a miserable 0.5. It peaks at 1.0 for PS5 players, but otherwise, most other platforms boast a similarly low score...

"This is it! This is the end of Rockstar, this is just too much," opines one particularly unhappy Xbox One customer, who has the highest number of "helpful" points.... "This so-called definitive edition is one of the most pathetic remasters of all time, especially considering how amazing Rockstar used to be. They were the top. They were the best there ever was. They showed other developers what can be done. I just can't believe that the end of Rockstar would be like this..."

Rockstar is now being inundated with refund requests as the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition backlash intensifies.
Oh, and one more thing. IGN reports that the game also appears to contain files for the infamous deleted sex mini-game "Hot Coffee."

"Bringing VS Code to the browser is the realization of the original vision for the product," Microsoft said in a blog post. "It is also the start of a completely new one. An ephemeral editor that is available to anyone with a browser and an internet connection is the foundation for a future where we can truly edit anything from anywhere."

Or, as Mike Melanson describes it in his "This Week in Programming" column, "Microsoft continued its march toward developer dominance this week with the launch of Visual Studio Code for the Web, a lightweight version of the company's highly popular (mostly) open source code editor..." Now, before you go getting too excited, VS Code for the Web isn't really a fully-functional version of VS Code running in the browser, as it has no backend to back it up, which means its primary purpose is for client-side HTML, JavaScript, and CSS applications... VS Code for the Web is able to provide syntax colorization, text-based completions and other such features for popular languages such as C/C++, C#, Java, PHP, Rust, and Go, while TypeScript, JavaScript, and Python are "all powered by language services that run natively in the browser" and therefore provide a "better" experience, while those aforementioned Web languages, such as JSON, HTML, CSS, and LESS, will provide the best experience. Extensions, meanwhile — which are among the top reasons for using VS Code — generally work for user interface customizations (and can be synced with your other environments), but, again, not so much for those back-end features.

Caveats aside, VS Code for the Web does, indeed, offer a lightweight, available-anywhere code editor for things like your tablet, your Chromebook, and heck, even your XBOX...

While companies like Amazon and Google seem to be sitting idly by in this arena, Microsoft is not the only company focused on providing remote developer experiences. The Eclipse Foundation, for example, last year offered what it said was "a true open source alternative to Visual Studio Code" with Eclipse Theia, and Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich said he expects this to be just the beginning. "We have been saying for years that the future of developer tools is the browser. Developers already use their browsers for the vast majority of their day-to-day tasks, with code editing being amongst the last to move," Milinkovich wrote in an email. "Microsoft's recent vscode.dev announcement is a recognition of this trend. I expect that every serious cloud vendor will be following suit over the next few quarters."

GitPod, meanwhile, has been hard at work in this very same arena, with its own launch just last month of the open source OpenVSCode Server, which also lets developers run upstream Visual Studio Code in the browser.
Gitpod co-founder Johannes Landgraf calls it "yet another validation that we reached a tipping point of how and where we develop software" — but also more. "Think orchestration and provisioning of compute, operating system, language servers and all other tools you require for professional software development in the cloud."

Melanson's column also argues VS Code for the Web is meant to entice geeks further into the Microsoft development universe. "The next thing you know, you've spent $100 on other things...like GitHub Codespaces, which is, after all, pretty much the same exact thing, except it provides all those back-end services and, more importantly for Microsoft, is not free to use. And more important still, once you've got all those developers fully hooked on VS Code, Codespaces, GitHub, and the rest of it, Azure isn't too far down the line now, is it?"