WIndows 8 Seeks More Game Devs, Offers Prizes

The jury's still out on Windows 8. Well, my jury isn't - I'm dual-booting my PC with it at the moment, and I think it's a clumsy, insidious and arrogant mistake in terms of how it applies to desktop PCs, even if it much makes more sense for touchscreens. I'll admit it doesn't seem to do anything negative to existent PC games, however. More on that later, though. One thing Microsoft does want to do with Win8 is re-establish it as a gaming platform, though in terms of the iDevice app store rather than a pixel-shaded mega-shooter sort of way. To try and encourage more game development for their awkwardly bastardised new OS, Mirosoft have launched a dev compo - with the winner bagging money, a marketing campaign and a posh trailer for their project.

Controversial game course Train2Game are involved (proving a PR campaign for the winner), which perhaps raises some alarm bells, but mentoring from Mastertronic's Andy Payne (a lovely fellow if ever there was one), Eidos emperor Ian Livingstone and Rebellion's Jason Kingsley is most certainly not to be sniffed at. The winner also gets a £4000 trailer, 500 quid and a Win 8 smartphone.

To enter, you need to first submit a game to the Windows 8 app store, so this isn't something that can be won on an idea or a promise alone. Full details are here.

MS have also put together a bunch of resources aimed at encouraging folk to dev for Win 8, which you can find on a site cunningly designed to look as though it's not made by Microsoft.