Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

The trick with Microsoft is to very carefully separate the good parts from the bad ones.

Labeling all of Microsoft as banned is really constraining your technology options. This is a gigantic organization with a very diverse set of people in it.

There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way.

Azure and Windows are where things start to get bad with Microsoft.

> There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way.

The reason all the AAA games are on it is because they're on the Windows platform, and more importantly their customers are on the Windows platform.

If 95% of gamers ran MacOS instead of Windows, you'd see a very different tech stack among game developers.

Game customers are on Windows because DirectX has been superior to OpenGL - development wise - for what, 30 years?

Yes, that's the essential reason. Even though that barrier has been lifted with Vulkan matching DX12 in many ways, the accumulated mass moves slowly.