Gabe Newell is not a man who uses weasel words; he says exactly what he means. "Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space," are the widely-quoted words he used in an interview with Venture Beat. "I think margins are going to be destroyed for a bunch of people," he added.

Rob Pardo agrees, saying on Twitter that Newell gave a "nice interview" and adding that Windows 8 is "not awesome for Blizzard either".

The opinions of these two men matter. Newell is the top dog at Valve, developer of the Half-Life series, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, and Portal, and owners of the massively influential Steam platform. Pardo is one of the main brains at Blizzard, famous for World of Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft. These two companies together represent a gigantic slab of the PC gaming market.

But what is it that has them so riled up? Newell made the above comments when discussing the open nature of the PC platform, and how vital it is for innovation and growth. Rumours about Microsoft's upcoming update to their Windows operating system suggest that Microsoft wants to lock the platform down.

We know that Windows 8 will have a marketplace app built in, imaginatively titled Windows Store, that will function much like similar the App Store on iOS touch devices and Google Play on Android phones and tablets. The main way in which it will reportedly differ from these stores is its lack of exclusivity.