Games for Windows Live Embraces Digital Distribution with Games on Demand

I dislike GFWL immensely.

1. It's tied to my xbox live account, so my house mate can't play games on my xbox while I'm playing games on my PC. If my xbox is turned on, my xbox account gets auto signed into it, which will get me auto signed out of me playing Batman on the PC. This is not something I should work around.
2. I had a friend who played and beat batman without creating a GFWL account. I then told him about the great free DLC endless fight challenge that was released. In order to get this DLC he had to create a GFWL account, sign into it and download it. This caused his default profile (not tied to a GFWL account) to be deleted.
3. The UI is cumbersome and doesn't take advantage of what the PC has to offer.

So, does this mean we'll finally buy PC versions of Fable 2 and Gears of War 2 through G4WL?

How long will it take for them to change the name of this service? I have a feeling using the abbreviation of GoD will probably piss a lot of people off.

Is this why I still can't buy the GOTY edition of Fallout 3 on Steam?

A real innovation would be giving me access to the same games on my console and the PC. If I buy MW2 through their PC digital distribution service, I should also be able to load my saved games and play on the console (if I feel like it).

I don't expect that to ever happen, but it would be really revolutionary, and MS is in a unique position to make that happen.

GFWL is the Zune of online services.

Ofcourse digital distribution will eventually snatch critical ground from the physical. But you that means having to utilize the digital format to favor the consumer, not doing this balance act where next-to-instant games can be purchased but usually (in Europe) costing easily three times as much as any of the games would do in stores.

If digital distribution is to have Any impact you have to cut prices over the physical alternative and stand toe-to-toe with new releases and be able to deliver good deals. STEAM has some nice deals at times but those are mostly weekend deals on crappy games or in rare occassions some good games you'd already have - but apart from that STEAM pricing is ridicilous, where games like Modern Warfare 2 would cost the little European 59€ (88US$) on the PC, where the average physical price was below 45€. While a little older games like Company of Heroes could cost you 49€ on STEAM, but 7€ (!!) in stores.

Microsoft has an oppurtunity to smack STEAM and EA Download and all those bastards on the fingers, but as it looks from the history with Xbox's Games on Demand it's just a filler service as they're too afraid to have the physical retailers giving them angry letters for evolving the market space. Distributing games online is virtually free, atleast once you have established a decent server cluster, but the physical games costs alot in both administration, production (in quanitities) and shipping and everthing in between - yet the physical is both more accessable and often incredibly much cheaper for the consumer... which is just depressing.

I know, a shitload of text, but I just wanted to have it ventilated.

ya know, i hope this succeeds.

competition is good for the consumer. thats irrefutable.

it might be cool to hate on microsoft but when i see a comment that says microsoft has done nothing for the pc it have to jump in and remind everyone that microsoft created the largest gaming platform in the world.

pc platform numbers dwarf all console numbers in history combined. thats a fact.

I'm.... leery.

GFWL was a great idea, but once they rolled it out it was pretty much abandoned. No funding, rare updates, compatibility issues, etc.

If they were just lightly staffed in order to roll this out I can understand, but still... leery.

If anyone can penetrate a market and take over market-share with an inferior product it's MS.

i.e. Netscape->IE, WordPerfect->Word, ICQ->MSN

well if they can give steam competition and give valve a boot up the arse in the way they price games fro euopeans then good stuff, as said above competition is good for everyone. Sure GFWL sucks and its a shame as it seem MS just didnt commit to it like they did the xbox 360

Had they been smart, they just would have bought Steam/Valve...

Good, maybe this will be a wake up call for Valve and force them to update Steam.

I'm skeptical, to say the least.

We've been hearing Microsoft make grand promises about the PC as a gaming platform since Windows 98, and aside from DirectX, none of it has actually ammounted to much. GFWL has been a royal pain in the ass for users and developers. DirectX 10 was stillborn. The DLC for Fallout 3 was filled with delivery issues (remember how you couldn't install the game to anything other than the C drive and expect the DLC to work?) and just a pain in the butt to manage. And to this day I still can't get any GFWL game that patches through GFWL to actually patch.

MS wants to try and make Windows be like the 360, where they can charge for every little bitty thing. I don't think these folks understand that it won't work in the PC space. A walled garden with transaction costs to do anything interesting is doomed to fail.

So this will flop, and in 6-8 months we'll hear about more layoffs in the GFW area while MS continues to say they're strong supporters of the PC gaming experience even though all they've done in recent years is try to hamper it.

The one thing to credit MS with is while they may fail over and over and over at something, eventually they get it right(ish). So maybe someday they'll get the PC gaming thing right.

GFWL...sigh...it's so hard to be a supporter of it. I really try to tell others how important it is for the PC to have a good, easy to use, cross-platform gaming service but Microsoft has just let it languish. All their promotion and talk about it is just smoke and mirrors. One day Windows is going to lose its place as the gaming OS of choice. Steam will turn into its own platform or something wild like that but another company is going to sense an opportunity and take it from Microsoft.

Did Valve really approach Microsoft and offer to partner up with them when they were first creating Steam? And Microsoft turned them down?

I have Steam. What possible use is this microsoft crap to me?

Piss off Microsoft. Not drinking your Kool-Aid.

If by "Our goal has always been to create a seamless online gaming experience for the Windows community" Mr. Ybarra meant, "Our goal is to make it completely impossible to enjoy playing games on a Windows PC" then yes, Games on Demand is definitely a step towards their goal, and they've been rockin' it so far.

I guess this means D2D will boycott all GFWL titles now too?

Microsoft have been universally incapable of doing anything good with their PC gaming side for years now, I cant wait to see this launch with titles at over-inflated prices. The use of only points is retarded, too.

I will shit my pants if the prices on here are consistently competitive with the other digital distribution platforms. I will then microwave my shitty underpants and eat hot shit undies if they offer frequent sales/discounts like Steam and D2D have offered recently.

I wonder what this is going to do about GFWL games being available on Steam and other soon-to-be-competing distribution platforms.