On the Store, Maze Lume is twenty versions behind

Maze Lume installs from the Microsoft Store. The listing has been live since 15 September — the same day we put the Windows, macOS and Linux packages on the game pages — and it went through on the first submission, with no rejections and no second attempt.

From today the link sits on the game page, below the itch.io one. The label reads: “it installs on Windows and updates itself”.

The second half of that sentence is, right now, a promise pointed at the wrong thing.

The number on the package is not the number of the game

The file uploaded to Partner Center is called MazeLume-STORE-0.33.0.0-x64.msix, weighs 38.1 MB, and is version 33. On the site, at this moment, Maze Lume is at v53.

Twenty versions apart. Not by choice: by two counters that have never spoken to each other.

Ours counts the game's versions and ends up in the name of the zip — maze-lume-win64-v53.zip — and next to the download buttons. MSIX wants four dot-separated numbers, written by hand into the manifest when the package is made. Neither reads the other, and nothing in between checks that they agree.

The Store package, on top of that, isn't born here. The .msix isn't on the server that builds everything else, and it isn't in the folder where we archive the builds either: in there are the zips for Windows, macOS and Linux, and nothing else. A step outside the system is a step nobody can reconcile.

Why this is worse than a zip

We already wrote that a zip is a photograph, and the page says so: the version is in the file name and next to the button. Whoever downloads knows what they are downloading.

The Store works the other way round, and that is its virtue: it updates itself, without anyone coming back to the site to check. Except it updates to whatever we send it. If we send nothing, “updates itself” means “stays on v33 forever”, and it says it with the air of being the best-kept of the three copies.

The label we wrote today is true about the mechanism and false about the contents. It's the kind of sentence you never catch yourself: it gets caught by someone who plays v53 in the browser, installs from the Store, and finds a poorer game without understanding why.

What the Store asked, that itch.io doesn't

To say yes the first time, the listing wanted things that don't exist on itch.io:

• an age questionnaire, which produced a PEGI 3;
• a choice of markets: the listing is in 240 markets, not the 242 the dashboard offers for games not yet submitted;
• a single architecture, x64, and a single device family, Windows 10/11 Desktop, with a minimum system of 10.0.17763.0;
• one extra declaration: the package uses runFullTrust, and validation flags it as a capability subject to approval.

These are all answers given once, in a form, and they now hold forever unless someone reopens them. Exactly the category of thing that has already hurt us here: a setting written once and never read again.

What we take away

• “Updates itself” describes the Store, not us. The part that doesn't update itself is ours.
• Two version counters nobody compares drift apart in silence, and the silence lasts until the first stranger sees them side by side.
• A package built outside the system that builds everything else is the only one nobody can verify automatically.
• Accepted on the first submission doesn't mean correct: it only means nobody on the other side had a reason to say no.