Perfect World is putting Xbox One multiplayer battler Gigantic on Windows beyond Microsoft’s app store

One of the Xbox One’s most interesting-looking free-to-play games is also coming to nearly every active version of Windows thanks to a new partnership.

Developer Motiga is teaming with publisher Perfect World, the company responsible for massively multiplayer role-playing games like Star Trek: Online and Neverwinter, to bring the competitive hero-based online arena battler Gigantic to every 64-bit version of Windows. Perfect World will include the game in its Arc game launcher, and it will build its own standalone launcher as well. Microsoft was already helping Motiga bring the game to Xbox One and Windows 10 through the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), but Perfect World will now ensure that people on Windows 7 and Windows 8 can also start playing the game. This should increase Gigantic’s exposure, and that should help it have a better chance of succeeding in a worldwide gaming market that is worth $99.6 billion.

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This is a maneuver we haven’t seen from a developer working with UWP before. This Microsoft initiative is all about making it as easy as possible to bring Xbox One games to PC, but it limits those sales to the Windows 10 Store. This is beneficial for some developers, and Motiga is taking advantage of that. But it is also widening the scope of the game beyond UWP using Perfect World’s resources.

UWP is Microsoft’s latest attempt to make a single app store for all of its platforms. It works onsPC, Windows smartphones, and Xbox One. But this initiative has also attracted criticism from people like Epic Games founder and chief executive Tim Sweeney, who claims UWP is potentially a path where Microsoft could lock people out of the traditionally open PC ecosystem. For now, however, games like Gigantic are showing that it is only an alternative route that developers can take in addition to releasing a traditional Windows program.

“As we expand our lineup of partnered developers, we always want to ensure that our team is publishing quality content for gamers,” Perfect World chief executive Bryan Huang said in a statement. “The passion that the Motiga team has makes them a perfect partner for PWE as we accomplish our goal of bringing quality products to the industry.”

For its part, Motiga chief executive Chris Chung says that his company is excited to work with Perfect World based on its successful record with Star Trek Online and Neverwinter.

GamesBeat has also reached out to Perfect World and Motiga to ask if Gigantic will have cross-platform play between the Xbox One, Windows 10 Store, and Windows 64-bit versions. Perfect World explained that it will still have complete cross-play functionality between the Xbox One and Windows 10 Store releases, and the publisher is investigating ways to combine that with the players on its platform. If it can figure that out, it could significantly increase the potential player pool.