Microsoft's promised its controversial Games for Windows Live service will "continue to get better" as more developers jump on board.
That's according to the senior producer of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business, Kevin Unangst, who admitted to CVG this month that a lack of "fantastic games" meant the online service had a "rocky start".
"I think because it was designed originally as a partner to the console service more than the PC service, we had a rocky start.
"We also didn't back it up with the most important thing, which is doing fantastic games to take advantage of the service. A network by itself isn't valuable - there needs to be great games to take advantage."
According to Unangst, the GFW Live service will evolve by taking on board the input of developers, such as Fable III's Lionhead and Age of Empires Online's Gas Powered Games.
"I look at it as like what Halo did for Xbox Live," he explained, "where you had Bungie and Microsoft going back and saying 'to make a great multiplayer game here's some things I need in the service, here's my audience'.
"The Age of Empire team has got a lot of great input and the same can be said for Lionhead, who said 'we're going to build Fable 3 on the PC' and know what they want out of the service.
"I think the underpinnings are great, I think it's going to continue to get better. We launched a new Marketplace which was great, we're selling Live and non-Live enabled games.
"We're also seeing developers get back to development. Epic did a great job of promoting Live with Bulletstorm. They're pleased with the platform and the service is going to continue to get better over time."
In the same interview, the senior producer claimed 2011 will be "incredible" for hardcore gamers on Xbox 360.
Look for the full thing shortly.
Comments
29 comments so far...
unacomn on 8 Mar '11 said:
Bullcrap. It was a direct port of Xbox Live, complete with a subscription requirement to even get achievements.
And no, it won't get better with more companies on board. It's not like it's being made by some indie developer that need support from other companies in order to have the funds necessary to make a better product. It's made by a gargantuan corporation that wants more control over a segment of the industry where they have consistently failed to offer a good product. There are only 2 reasons GFWL is being used right now:
1) It's a port of Xbox Live, making Xbox to PC ports easier
2) It gives devs the netcode for multiplayer free of charge
The Only way it can get better is if the GFWL division is separated from the Xbox division and re-engineered from the ground up by different people.
Imaduck on 8 Mar '11 said:
Start linking games that are on Xbox already up properly, backtrack. Update the likes of Dragon Age, Mass Effect, come on! I really like GFWL, I've had no problems with it whatsoever, I don't get the hate it receives. For all the positives of Steam - it's given me quite a lot of trouble at times.
Hunam85 on 8 Mar '11 said:
I'd rather it just go away TBH.
sakaspuds on 8 Mar '11 said:
if anything it needs to be more like xboxlive, one of the main reasons why i buy a multiplatform game on xbox is because of xboxlive, pc games need to bring people together more, i know that will upset a lot of the 'pirate' game players that cant play online, but online coop is so much fun, steam is good, i use it too, but its not as good as xboxlive, and i'll like to see gfwl be just as good if not better one day
runadumb on 8 Mar '11 said:
Reading that rattled me. He kept saying they need the games and the service is great but I think quite the opposite. It needs the service THEN they can attract the games.
For some things GFWL actually works fine. Keeping track of scores in Batman AA's time Attack mode was seamless. I have found it handy for things like that but my list of negatives is much higher. Batman wouldn't take my product-key till I was halfway through the game, for no obvious reason. Every time I tried it, it failed.
No instant messaging is like going back to the dark ages.
I couldn't get voice chat to work at all in SF4. Maybe I was doing something wrong but I know my way around a PC so if it's that hard they fail.
Having to start a game, download a patch and then restart the game is pitiful compared to steams background downloading.
Resident Evil 5 seemed to work fine with it. Had a quick Co-op game and voice chat worked but it was the only time everything went smoothly, and I only played it for 10 mins.
All in all, I just dislike it and sigh everytime I see a game using it. So long as that game doesn't use multiplayer I don't really care but I would prefer something else.
Oh and I can't remember if it was GFWL's fault or not but installing Bioshock 2 was the biggest chore. Oh my god that was awful.
gilly83 on 8 Mar '11 said:
well GWL can ONLY get better i dont like it tbh, steam is way more user friendly.
Cant help to think that Micro$oft have seen how dominate Steam/Valve are on the pc and how much cash their raking in and what a slice
Imaduck on 8 Mar '11 said:
I think it does just annoy pirates. I've been gaming for like 15/16 years, mostly on PC, but I love GFWL. As the dude above said, it's nice, it's like PC gaming has finally got more connected again. Great the way it links to the Xbox as well and is free, should stay so. Achievements are great, they encourage you to challenge yourself, try things you may not have thought of. Who doesn't like getting rewarded on top of the usual fun? It's a positive experience.
jtake9 on 8 Mar '11 said:
Why try and fragment the pc market?
gobbybobby on 8 Mar '11 said:
G4WL are good but I hope MS keep releasing games on Steam, I fear they will stop releasing on Steam if they compete against them.
martinawatson on 8 Mar '11 said:
microsoft havnt got the money to make it a good service..............................t**ts
Desert Fox on 8 Mar '11 said:
I really hate GFWL. I would happily just watch it burn a pixelated fiery sprite death if that were possible.
Maybe I've just been unlucky with the service, but I've had issues with it on every game that uses it. It took a damn age to get Dawn of War II working with it, and now it's thrown another wobbly when I try to play Chaos Rising. I'm so glad Retribution got shot of it in favour of Steamworks.
Some of my issues could possibly be down to how my router is set up (according to their support anyway), but to be fair, my router hasn't really been tinkered with a great deal. Every other online service (such as Steam) has no issue in running on my machine, so it really bugs me when GFWL decides it has a problem with what must be a fairly default setup.
JFC2294 on 8 Mar '11 said:
G4WL is so bad i hated playing games with it having to sign into my windows live account to load my save on gta 4 when i bought the game on steam and i think M$ should let this flop die if i want to talk to people on Live i will use my xbox not pc
nathar on 8 Mar '11 said:
GFWL is one of the most pointless services i know of. The ONLY purpose it has is for getting exclusive bits of DLC and thats it. I know some people like to keep track of achievements and gamerscores, but thats where the benefits of GFWL end so I'm at a loss as to how they could make it worse. Perhaps they could add a few more log in screens, misalign the mouse with the buttons by a few more inches, and completely take over matchmaking for multiplayer?
If there was one question I could find out the answer to about GFWL it would be this...
If this is genuinely designed for PC as the name 'games for windows' implies why did signing up create an account on Xbox.com? I really feel that if you own an xbox, GFWL is an excellent way of synching your XBOX and PC gaming experiences. For those who don't game on an xbox the whole experience is completely lost on us and we will continue to hate MS for forcing it on us
lmimmfn on 8 Mar '11 said:
I also wish this POS would just die, neither of my Batman AA or Gears of War save games work anymore and come up as corrupted. It took me 7 hours to get my GTA IV saves working again after a reinstall.
I cant stand it, it also has limited activations on most games which very few realise, and coupled with steam it provides the worst user experience ever. Log into Steam, start game, have steam overlay, then GFWL overlay, then login to GFWL( even in offline mode )
The_KFD_Case on 8 Mar '11 said:
Good! 'Cause it can't get much worse!
P.S. Even with a 500% improvement over it's current iteration I would still be loathe to touch that P.O.S. with a 10 foot barge pole. Just save yourself some effort and money (and the rest of us a lot of trouble) and put this particular cow out to pasture, MS.
JoWoo on 8 Mar '11 said:
This cow doesn't deserve the pasture. It deserves the Bolt Gun.
Welsh Jester on 8 Mar '11 said:
Better? how about adding ANTI CHEAT?
instead of a report system that is so much rubbish that you can report any person for cheating even if they haven't been.
Sorry but steam is still way better, even if some cheaters do get past the anti cheat at least it's not 100% full of them.
i like jam donut on 8 Mar '11 said:
'Games for Windows live will get better, so will kinect. Just don't switch to sony or nintendo, we got used to your dumb fat asses.'
'Remember dear customers, it's all about hope and potential.'
paketep on 8 Mar '11 said:
OMG, the Unansngstsnts guy is back.
Hey, Kevin, wanna improve GFWL?. KILL IT.
Believe me, all PC gamers, for once, will be grateful to Microsoft.
And while you're at it, kill or rename the abomination that is AoE online. And since you've been doing nothing but f****ing PC gamers for years, don't come back now and ask for our money. You don't f***ing deserve it.
Start by releasing the Halos, Fable 2, GoW 2+, etc for the PC, THEN we'll start to believe you.
jubbgi01 on 8 Mar '11 said:
You know what's better than GFWL? A candle... in the eye
Tazadoobii on 8 Mar '11 said:
You all complain about how crap it is and most of you won't even use it! Don't kick it 'til you tried it! Nothing wrong with it in my opinion!
wasted-again on 8 Mar '11 said:
Anything that gets in the way of stealing and cheating is bound to get the thumbs down from PC fanboys.
LoganN on 9 Mar '11 said:
Basically this. Most of the people bashing it haven't ever used it.
Oh, they seem to forget how Steam was s**t for years. It is the same situation.
ImpatientZero on 9 Mar '11 said:
Most people use it only because it is forced on them, not because they like it. I would much rather use Steam for the same sort of thing, but it still amazes Me how many games force me to use GFWL, on top of Steam. GFWL simply seems to be a horrible system, that traps the user in so many ways, or requires the user to pay for things that should be provided free.
Hell, sometimes it refuses to even properly register games that are ran through it, like stand alone expansion packs.
maybe it will get better, but it has a long way to go to be good.
jorg on 9 Mar '11 said:
GfWL is a mess right now, and it does nothing that Steam doesn't do better. No proper standalone client, broken voice chat, it's way of patching doesn't lend itself to RTS games well, lots of small inexplicable bugs etc.
I dont get why are ppl saying you need GfWL to "bring ppl together online" as if there weren't online multiplayer games long before consoles or xboxlive. Last time I checked the best pc coop game (L4D2) is still on Steam. Steamworks has all the social features that GfWL has and more (achievements, friend lists, profiles, instant messaging, matchmaking plus useful stuff like cloud saves, the new screenshot feature etc.) and it actually works most of the time. If it doesnt Valve eventually fixes it unlike MS, from whom you'll only hear radio silence or empty promises to get better. Steam is not perfect, but its the best available right now. Until MS reaches that standard I don't want any game using GfWL over Steamworks.
The problem is that I don't see MS reaching that standard ever, b/c they just don't care enough about the PC market. They have demonstrated multiple times that they view the PC gaming division as the Xbox division's little brother, and they won't do anything on the PC that might hurt the Xbox business. See the lack of a real client on PC, Fable 3, where an MS europe guy flat out said that a same day pc release would syphon too many sales form the xbox version in places like Germany, the lack of Alan Wake etc. PC only gets scraps from MS, and frankly this half-assed attitude towards the PC market manifests itself perfectly in the current state of GfWL.
Now this might be understandable from a business standpoint, Xbox makes more money after all, but then it would be better for everyone if MS just kept developing DirectX and Windows, and left the rest of it to companies who care (like Valve). That way we wouldn't have to put up with their half-assed bs software every now and then when they succesfully managed to moneyhat/bully some publisher to use their half-baked service.
TormDK on 9 Mar '11 said:
Games for Windows Live's biggest problem is that it shares the 18 month development cycle with the other live programs in the live suite.
If Microsoft wants to make G4WL better it needs to speed up with the updating. Steam is currently leading the PC Digital Distribution marked because they update frequently as Steam was quite crap when it was initially released.
That, and nutty sales which Steam also started. People want to buy games from a reliable vendor and right now Steam seems to be it.
So if Microsoft wants to be top dog start updating your client faster.
Shock120 on 9 Mar '11 said:
If GFWL is going to get better, why isn't Halo 3, ODST and Reach made for PC?
It's already made clear how Microsoft only cares about their console, and it's Valve who care about the PC...and Mac.
Microsoft doesn't even know how to support their own titles, like Halo 2 Vista was sabotaged and abandoned within a year, up till this day it isn't even on Games on Demand, the game is simply in the trash for them.
GFWL is about failing to bring the console experience to the PC, when what I want is a PC experience for the PC.
PC experience has to include mod support.
r0zm4n on 10 Mar '11 said:
"continue to get better"? doesn't that imply that it has gotten better at some point, as opposed to the reality which is that GFWL started badly; tailed off in the middle and the less said about the end the better.
Yellow6 on 11 Mar '11 said:
Fantastic point
I had lots of goodwill towards Microsft (don't laugh).... until I had GFWL FORCED upon me.
I'm not a computer expert but I'm not new to them either.
I thought, OK, let's give this a go.
Took a few attempts to set up.
Finally I got Batman AA running.
None of my scores upload to GFWL so what was the point?
I couldn't download anything so what was the point?
I then spent ages trying to remove it from my PC....and bits still keep popping up.
I estimate I wasted a weekend and a half of my life pi55ing around trying to get GFWL to work.
MS - treat me like crap once shame on you, treat me like crap twice shame on me....I'll not be back
I have used Steam only to authenticate games so far but that seemed easier than GFWL, I'm not a steam fanboy but I'll use them again.
To the geniuses that came on here slagging off PC gamers as pirates?
The only pirated games I've seen in the last few years were on a Wii at someone's party!
Sure there's pirates on the pc but GFWL is not being sold as a DRM system.
It's supposed to help the gamers.
You seem to think PC gamers only complain about GFWL because they can't pirate through it.
Well, I've never bought (or accepted) a pirated game on PC so I have nothing to complain about?
Then why is it the worst piece of poo I've had on my PC in years?
The result is instead of giving Batman AA a 9.5/10 I'd give it an 8/10 just for the pain GFWL caused me.
MS - I'm no pirate.
I'm not a hater.
I really wanted to use it
Why?
Whyyy?
Whyyyyyy?