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Games for Windows Live Marketplace Adds New Titles, Puts Old Prince of Persias on Sale
by Chris Faylor, Jun 08, 2010 7:20pm PDT
The "Games on Demand" section of Microsoft's digital distribution platform Games for Windows Live "will soon be the home of day-and-date game releases from the industry's biggest names," the company declared today.
Alongside the day-and-date releases, which kicked off today with Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands PC, the company will be adding more games to the online catalog, including those that don't utilize Games for Windows Live functionality.
To celebrate, Microsoft slashed the prices on two older Prince of Persia entries:
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - $2.49 (75% Off until June 14, 2010)
- Prince of Persia: Warrior Within - $2.49 (75% Off until June 14, 2010)
Over 100 additional titles are due on the digital distribution platform this year, the company boasted, with the day-and-day releases including efforts from 2K Games, Capcom, Microsoft Game Studios, Rockstar Games, THQ and Ubisoft.
Among the other titles added today: Age of Empires III, Assassin's Creed, II, Borderlands, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Max Payne 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. Thanks to Shacker taczbr for the heads up.
Comments
I don't buy into digital content delivery systems until they're relatively well proven. I didn't go into Steam until Half-Life 2's release, since I wouldn't be able to play Half-Life 2 without it, and Steam had been rather well tested for at least a year with Counter-Strike. I haven't been drawn too much to GoG's catalog, so I haven't signed up there. I don't have a 360, and Microsoft still has a ton of work to do on the PC gaming usability side (compared to Steam), so I'm not interested in Games for Windows Live. I have literally zero interest in anything Ubisoft's doing, so I'm not interested in Uplay. All of the other silly "loyalty network" things like Cerberus for Bioware, Rockstar, etc., are annoying, and are for games that I'm not that interested in, so I don't get into those. I don't use Facebook, and I'm not interested in Twitter, other than checking on a very very very tiny list of people.
Just too many damned logins, and all of these companies are so convinced that their system is going to be The One Digital Content Delivery System To Rule Them All. There is no one gatekeeper to the PC platform (not even Microsoft's Windows division itself; the US Department of Justice and the Eurozone have been suing, fining, and nagging them for over a decade for anti-competitive behavior). So publishers and developers are going to have to "pick sides" with their DRM selection (GFWL activation, Steamworks, Uplay, etc.), or release to multiple digital distributors (which already happens to some extent, though at times it can lead to the "DRM Soup" condition, as with Bioshock 2 on Steam, or with any digitally distributed 2010-released Ubisoft game).
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