Games for Windows Live, well what can I say? It is perhaps the most under utilised bit of software on the PC yet the one which seems to cause the most problems for gamers. Certainly I have had my fair share of issues with it. You could say that I have been fortunate in that my experience with GFWL has been limited until now, yes I used it with GTAIV and some other games back when it was the ‘new’ thing on the block, but now with Street Fighter 4 and a desire to play Fallout 3 again I have found myself coming up against a brick wall with the program numerous times.
It reached the point where I created a brand spanking new account just to try and move on from the problems I was having, it didn’t work. I still constantly struggle to connect to a) the Windows client of the program and b) the in-game system that you use. It isn’t simply just a case of errors appearing saying I am not connected to the internet (when I clearly am as I am talking to people on Steam Chat about my troubles), nay, I often get messages saying that my Windows Live ID or password is invalid. This doesn’t inspire confidence in something which has been under constant scrutiny since day one.
Microsoft have made several blunders when it comes to GFWL, not least their attempts at enforcing the same Xbox Live fees system onto a platform which has historically been free of such things. Now the service seems to be but an annoying fly in the Microsoft PR department, the 3.0 release of the client was only brought to public knowledge when a variety of small games sites started to run the story. Surely what seems to be such a big release should be treated with a bit more fanfare than what it received? You can’t go a month without hearing about plans for a big new feature for the Xbox Live system, surely we should get some of the promotional effort, even if we don’t get the same new features.
You see GFWL should be perfectly poised to dominate the PC digital distribution area, most new PC games now come with the basic Games for Windows banners, but it is a pitiful number which use the Live part of it. You can see why they don’t, apart from the connection issues and such like people receive, platforms such as Steam offer an all round better service. The idiotic requirement to us Microsoft Points for DLC is one of the biggest downfalls of the system, why we aren’t able to just use a credit card or PayPal to purchase DLC straight off I don’t know.
Microsoft have made blunders with GFWL, and they don’t seem ready to embrace it and push it forward. They should, it has a lot of potential, yet it is held back by dodgy network code, an infuriating requriement to sign into GFWL to play saved games and many other issues that surround it. It has come to the stage where I am waiting to quit a game and restart it until I get signed in, I have no faith that it will work first time up. That perhaps is the worst thing about it.
I’m in favour of more gfwl titles… Not for any real fondness of the system, but because I have a 26k gamerscore on 360 games and don’t want to start from scratch on steam. I see the issues though – not had any of yours, but it has deleted my entire friends list and blocks me from re-adding them. They all still appear on my xbox though…
“don’t want to start from scratch on steam” – you know steam doesn’t have gamerscores right? It has achievements but no one pays attention to whose got what.
I like the “Games for windows” thing as it ensures various stuff like 64bit compatibility, but the “live” thing can go to hell. Steam works beautifully, in every way. I’ll stick with that thanks.
…and that just doesn’t appeal to me in the same way, I’m afraid. I’m a bit compulsive in that I like to keep track of the games I (and others) have played, and how much they’ve done in them. With Steam and GFWL it’s incomplete, because not everything’s supported.
With Xbox Live every game has to have it, and that makes a massive difference for me.
Yeah, I suppose I can see where you’re coming from. It would be nice for every game to have centralised tracking like that – I suppose it’s the price we pay for having a (pretty much) open platform.