Well here’s a spot of news. Games For Windows Live Gold accounts are now to be free. According to a 1Up report, Microsoft announced today that PC users will no longer have to pay for a Live Gold account to be able to access the cross-platform shenanigans of their multiplayer gaming. Which can only be delightful news to the 360’s paying suckers.
1Up go on to say that MS are planning a GFW Marketplace, aping the Xbox Live Marketplace, also offering various downloadable bits and pieces from demos to extra gaming content. Which sounds awfully similar to, er, the rest of the internet.
Games For Windows has been a strange idea since the start. It’s certainly a nice thought that we can more simply judge if a game will work with our PC, but the numerical system hasn’t exactly caught on, and the lack of a shift over to Vista means it’s pretty meaningless to most players. If anything, GFW seems to be viewed as a disturbing ghettoisation of the PC world, adding Microsoft branding to games and little else. Microsoft are clearly attempting to loosen GFW’s collar and tie a bit, also planning to make it simpler for developers to integrate with the system.
It’s hard not to roll your eyes at asking PC gamers to pay money for access to forms of multiplayer gaming – something that’s been free on the machine since the beginning of time. Perhaps mad with greed after seeing the success and uptake of the 360’s Gold memberships they couldn’t see why another gaggle of gamers wouldn’t want to fork out. And clearly they haven’t, and as such Microsoft are giving up on the daft plan. However, GFW Marketplace, at first glance at least, does seem to suggest the same muddled thinking is at work. A place where we can download demos and additional content for PC games?! What an innovation! (Entertainingly, if you search Google for “games for windows marketplace” the top result reads: “Windows Marketplace: An error has occurred.”)
Presumably the sensible move for a GFW Marketplace would be a major overhaul of the almost unknown digital distribution platform at Windows Marketplace, with which inevitably Microsoft would hope to rival Steam. But that’s my speculation.
Meanwhile, now you’ll be able to play all those 360/PC crossover games… um… shit, I’m sure there are some. Well, if you can find any… SHADOWRUN! That was one. But that was rubbish. Er, Universe At War? It’ll do. So yeah, get on your Universe At War multiplayer and start jeering at the 360 players who are paying! Man, that would have been a lot simpler if anyone cared about PC/360 crossover play.
Cheers to Mikael for the tip.
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Gamercard and Achievements work just fine on the free Silver account too – all Gold gets you on the 360 is the multiplayer and a week’s headstart on downloading stuff from the shop.
If 360 owners are going to get free Gold as well, then the obvious timing would be when the new Dashboard interface gets released later this year. Home should be coming out about that time as well, and it would make a great spoiler.
There are three things that the anti-360 crowd complain about every time the subject – RROD, paying for Live and the small hard drive. The latest chip die reductions are supposed to have dramatically reduced the frequency of the box dying, and they’re replacing the 20Gb drive with a 60Gb in a month or so. Making Live properly free would finish things off nicely.
Yeah, the snes RPG version of shadowrun was fantastic. The FPS was decidedly meh.
Oh shit, guess I’m elitest now =/
@RLacey:
“And if that leads to more cross-platform titles, great. I don’t see how that’s a problem, even if that vast majority of said titles won’t get it to work properly. It’s not like one has to play cross-platform anyway.”
It’s a problem because it’s adding a little annex to a horrifically restrictive walled garden rather than letting developers choose the best solution. Cross-platform gaming should encompass all (reasonable) platforms, not just Xbox 360 and Windows Vista (and ZuneLOL). The risk is that eventually a decent game will end up hamstrung in this way as a result of a publisher being offered a big sack of money.
@iainl:
The fourth would be Microsoft’s bandwagon-jumping, high-fiving corporate culture. While they’ve undeniably drummed up a lot of business for certain developers with the 360, the fact that they’ve diverted so much talent to catering for a specific American demographic (dragging once-good developers like Rare and Lionhead into the mire with them) could be described as an act of cultural vandalism.
@Robin
That’s excatly why its horrible.
Can you image some poor sucker on a 360 playing against some1 on a PC using a laser mouse w/ a 2560×1600 monitor.
now image that the person on the PC end is using a hacked client & shooting through walls, or zooming in & sniping from a mile away, or using an aimbot for 1 headshot kills while bunny-hopping.
avoiding players like that is the only reason i subscribe to XBL. if they start showing up i’ll end up moving all my multiplayer to the PS3; & MS will lose my money on 360 & PC.
I’m just confused as to what it is that’s so new and shiny about this marketplace. They seem to be holding up demos, trailers and patches as something new and exciting, but as mr Walker says, that’s already being done by the erm.. internet. Also, Steam.
I guess the only thing this does that Steam doesn’t is let you play with 360 friends, and I don’t have any of those, so “meh”.
Am I the only one for whom the GFW website is down? ;-)
@The Letter Z – the single biggest point to GfWL, and why it’s Vista only is that it’s a totally paranoid security monster; hacked clients should be about as difficult as playing on a Windows box can be. The second is that the matchmaking settings are a Godsend for ensuring you don’t have to play with annoying people twice, before you file a report (which gets followed up) for them being cheating cheaters.
@Robin – on the one hand I kind of agree, but on the other they don’t seem any worse than Sony or Nintendo in that regard. Rare still didn’t have anything like the freedom they did when they were Ultimate Play The Game.
Microsoft gets a clue. Finally.
Perhaps there will be more incentive for cross-platform games to be produced now?
I like the idea, I have lots of real life friends who haven’t played PC games since 1998, and all have Xbox360s. I would be able to play with them without needing to use a gimped controller!
Hopefully part of this deal will include bringing the xbox live arcade to PC.
@ianl “the single biggest point to GfWL, and why it’s Vista only ”
It was only Vista exclusive in the beginning when Halo 2 and Shadowrun came out on PC. Before Fall 2007 they made it available on XP too, just in time for other GfWL supported games like Gears of War and Kane & Lynch.
About the TrueSkill system: It is in fact too good, if used in its raw form, because it arrives at your “true” skill level after only a very few number of matches. After that you will only see very little progress, simply because it takes a lot of time and effort to improve real skills. This was first seen in PGR3, which used TrueSkill as its only visible means of progression, and was not very satisfying for that reason.
Later games, such as Halo, only used TrueSkill in a strongly modified form, to give a (artificial) sense of skill progression, to make it more satisfying for the players. I think that TrueSkill is great for matchmaking, but its best used invisibly to the players, with other (more experience-based) systems of progression for the players.
D’oh. Sorry SwiftRanger – I’d missed that. So how do they do all the bot-blocking stuff, then? Because as a 360 owner I know I’ll be avoiding any game full of cheating PC people, even if any individual one of them can be easily avoided.
I have a 360 and I play on it regularly. Absolutely nothing wrong with them.
Oh no, my free month of Gold membership that came with Gears of War is now worthless!
Seriously, though, maybe I’ll finish GoW now…
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