- General Heed
- |
- Exalted Heroic Member
Bring Back Rocket Race!!!
Posted by: Dr Syx
Posted by: General Heed
Games for Windows Live in my opinion was a huge missed oppurtunity for Microsoft from the beginning. If they had made it fully free from the beginning and included party chat and avatars, then they'd have a pretty decent service that could compete with Steam. If I recall, when GFWL first came out, Steam did not have party chat yet. You had to rely on additional 3rd party software to get party chat.
The advantage of Xbox Live at the time was that it unified all the commonly used online features of a PC. Back then, you would have Steam or XFire for friends list, then Team Speak or Ventrillo for party chat, and other services for whatever else you might've needed. If Microsoft had included a unified service with GFWL from the beginning, before Steam did, then today, GFWL might be a bit more popular than it is.I'm a bit fuzzy on this but did party chat EVER work for GFWL? Also, Xfire had group voice chat way before GFWL started. It's just that people liked to use TeamSpeak/Ventrilo which were/are much better than the Live's voice chat systems. Yes, the 2003 version of TeamSpeak was better than Xbox Live's systems.
Paying for certain things wasn't even GFWL's main problem. Most GFWL games (Even to this day) have so many bugs that have no known fix that I'd give a guess that possibly ~15% of the people who buy the games are likely to have a broken game. For Halo 2 specifically, that would probably rise to ~%20. That's actually me being generous, too. There's not one thing about GFWL that is good. It was never good to begin with. You could count achievements but to be honest, is that really that big of a deal at all? I don't know many PC gamers at all that give a -blam!- about achievements. In fact, even though this is just a personal opinion, I find achievement hunting annoying.
Xbox Live for PC, if it's equal to the 360 version, could be a huge hit potentially. These days, Xbox Live is more geared towards multi-media entertainment than just simple multiplayer. Basically, Xbox Live on the PC could replace Windows Media Center and become your all-in-one source for entertainment. One app for everything. Such a thing could make Steam step things up a bit. This is the problem with that theory: Steam actually knows what it is. It's a gaming application. When you're on a PC, you want multiple programs that are designed specifically for certain things. You don't want something to be okay at everything. You want multiple things that are the best at doing what they do. That's why people still use TeamSpeak/Ventrilo while playing games through Steam. I'd rather Steam stick to giving me gaming features instead of integrating a music/video library. If I want that, I'll just get another thing for that. The reason this works out for the 360 is because it needs it. You can't get an alternative music/video organizer. You can't get another thing for voice chat.
That leads to the ultimate cause of why this damned thing failed: The PC isn't a -blam!- console. They tried to "simplify" things but the truth is it just doesn't fit with PC culture. PC gamers hate simplicity. We want to be completely in control, we want to have multiple programs that have their own purposes, we love getting our hands dirty... Leave console stuff to the consoles and let us keep the system we love. If we wanted to play on an Xbox 360 we'd play on a -blam!- Xbox 360.
To this day, party chat still doesn't exist for Games For Windows Live. I suspect the infrastructure exists to support it since we can already receive party chat invites. But without party chat, GFWL just feels incomplete for an Xbox gamer and probably trash for a PC gamer.
It should be interesting to note that recently, multimedia consumption on Xbox Live has surpassed multiplayer gaming. It surprises me that that's even possible. But Microsoft does also intend the Xbox 360 to be a true home entertainment device and for it to somewhat compete with Apple TV.
You know with Windows 8, they're trying to integrate everything together like on Xbox 360. I don't know if you've tried the Windows 8 consumer preview yet, but everything gaming and multimedia related are basically organized and integrated in a similar fashion as on the Xbox 360. Personally I have mixed feelings on that. But then again, almost all of my multimedia consumption is done through the default Microsoft software such as Windows Media Player. I do use Zune Software for syncing music to my Windows Phone though, but anyways, I've never really used any non-Microsoft software for media consumption. For music and videos, Windows Media Player does everything I need it to. So in Windows 8, who knows? Maybe it will turn out to be a good thing after all.
This is just speculation on my part, but it's not exactly something I just thought of either. The press seems to agree with this guess as well. It seems in the near future, Microsoft will eventually merge all of their platforms together into one. The next generation Xbox may very well be the last generation Xbox, with the Xbox-brand being used in Windows for gaming purposes much like how the Zune brand was used for music and video services. So in the future, it could just be Windows tablets.