Microsoft's free distribution of the powerful Direct3D and DirectSound libraries is an effort to ensure that more games for domestic computers are made for their own operating system. Since their release, more and more commercial game-engines have chosen to become reliant on Microsoft technologies to benefit from these rarified, yet feature rich products. This hampers evolution of healthy diversity within the artform by creating a market increasingly dependent on the Microsoft platform and the specific features and functions it offers.

While there is certainly plenty of flexibility to make a variety of games with these libraries (they are quicker to get up and running than their opensource equivalents), the inability to access the code in these libraries locks the developer out of having absolute access to extend and understand the technology.

For instance in the development of an engine, we (selectparks) chose to use the DirectSound libraries in our game because of the broad compatibility with existing soundcards and relative ease of use when developing within a Microsoft platform. Various restrictions built into these libraries meant that there was no way of integrating certain dynamic realtime sound features simply because we simply couldn't browse the sourcecode to better understand how our sound events were being handled. As a result we altered our game design only to find later that the feature was reasonably easy to implement in OpenAL.

Taking all this into account, it's clear how the interests of the developer are positioned secondarily to that of an operating system whose associated game technologies are absolutely geared toward exclusivity and profit. In this way whatever one develops in this platform is ultimately curated by the kinds of games Microsoft wants developers to make.

Within other fields of artistic practice, such restrictions would include budget and the innate limitations of the material intself. The difference when computer gaming is chosen as a medium, is that the tools themselves are shaped and controlled by the end games of the Entertainment Industry.

Anyway, these toolkits may not at all be compatible with the chosen development environment of the artist; or the interests of widest distribution to other computer-using audiences. The relative lack of major titles for the game-capable Linux and Apple operating systems is indication of this monopoly.