MIcrosoft Promises Big Things Ahead for Games for Windows Live

Wicky_42

Wicky_42

New member
Sep 15, 2008
2,468
0
0
GfWL is a joke and I don't see that changing any time soon. Not even when they were offering a couple of titles for 10 cents was I interested - having to set up an extra account just to use DoW2 on Steam was ridiculous, and I've yet to hear ANYTHING good about the 'service'.

I'm happy with steam because it is unobtrusive, has an amazing catalogue of games, runs frequent deals, and in my experience has had pretty much no hitches or glitches. They worst it's done is to be a required part of games that I've bought off the shelf - it was a nasty shock when E:TW linked to Steam and I'll be careful in the future to check what online services are required in future purchases, but only because I now know that that's the sort of shit that can get pulled on you. With GfWL out there, that's just not a risk I'm willing to take!
 
Andy Chalk

Andy Chalk

One Flag, One Fleet, One Cat
Nov 12, 2002
45,698
1
0
The only experience with GFW Live I can recall off the top of my head was Fallout 3. Went fine, no issues once I figured out a few entirely unnecessary quirks, like how it stores saved games from connected and non-connected games in entirely different locations. (That was fun.) That said, there are certainly things I don't like about it, and locking people out of games they bought fair and square just because they happen to live in the wrong country is very near the top of that list. There's probably some kind of justification for it but from a pure business sense it's just stupid.

The thing about Unangst's comments I found most interesting was the Halo/Xbox Live reference. You want to make GFW Live relevant? Make it suck less, yes, and then deliver the goddamn games. Give us Halo (the whole thing), Gears (the whole thing), Alan Wake, all the stuff you pimp the hell out of as a 360 exclusive - bring them to the PC too. Relevance springs forth from games and the bottom line is that for as much noise as Microsoft makes about supporting PC gaming, it's clearly a distant second fiddle. Relaunching the Flight franchise isn't going to change that.

It'll never happen, of course. Microsoft is way too invested in the 360 as its gaming platform. But it's a nice idea.
 
000jinx

000jinx

New member
Mar 8, 2011
32
0
0
Honestly, I will probably never buy a game from GFWL. All it has been to me and probably all it ever will be, is another gate standing in the way of me getting into my game. For instance, if I went and reinstalled GTA 4, from Steam, I'd have to restart that game at least twice to get past GFWL updates, etc. Even when I reformatted, kept the actual game on a separate drive and copied the saved game info back into the correct folder, I still had to relaunch twice for GFWL. Fix this and we might talk about me ever spending money in your store, otherwise why would I bother? More importantly, why would developer's. Imho, Bioshock 2, a mediocre game when compared to the first, didn't gain anything, at least in my eyes, from making me sign into GFWL. What did it gain them? Annoyed customers who had to go through another gate to get into their game? With GTA 4, this wasn't as big a deal since we had to go through the ridiculous Rock Star Social Club anyway, but two splash screen videos you can't skip, or even go to a different screen while the game is loading, a supposed News screen, three button pushes, rinse, repeat and then rinse and repeat again and you got to start to wonder if anyone actually wants us to play that game. But that's not all GFWL either.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom