A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

There are a few issues at play here. It's not an issue when a company that develops an OS decides to update that OS. It's also not an issue when they offer OS distributions tailored to the corporate market, lacking media features. It makes (a minimal amount of) sense.

It is, however, an issue when that OS developer gets airs, buys some game companies, and starts pretending it's something it's not: A game developer.

When your business model is based around partitioning off as many OS features as possible to wring as many dollars as possible from the market, this can present problems when your other business involves selling games that are supposed to run on as many machines as possible.

No more so is this the case than in the dreaded "Windows 10 Enterprise N" use case. It's been known for years now that to have audio in any number of use cases, you need to install an additional driver pack. But this pack can become outdated just as fast as a Windows 10 install.

This is, in fact, what happened here, with an additional dash of bullshit thrown in. The latest version of Windows (20H2, because apparently straight-up numbers don't suffice anymore), deprecated the APIs involved in the Media Feature Pack.

For every version up to this one, it was pretty simple - download the offline installer for the Media Feature Pack, install it, be happy. In MIcrosoft's narcissistic rush to incorporate everything within their own UI, you can't do that now.