for reference, here's Stardock's CEO- http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2009/10/05/stardock-slams-games-for-windows-live/1
Wardell even goes as far as to say that, if Microsoft keep up with Games For Windows Live and if it reaches a position where GFWL is the de facto standard, then he'll stop making PC games.
Games For Windows Live is Microsoft's attempt to replicate Xbox Live on the PC with an all-in-one marketplace, friends, copy-protection and auto-update system built directly into the games. Unfortunately, it's not proven popular with gamers or critics - and we've had a fair deal of problems with it too.
"I started out as a big Games for Windows Live advocate," said Wardell. "I intended for Elemental to be on Games for Windows Live, but then as we got closer, the Xbox group took it over more and more. And they have things where, oh, if you want to use Games for Windows Live to update your game, you have to go through [their] certification. And if you do it more than X number of times, you have to pay money. It's like, "My friends, you can't do that on the PC."
"On the console, I don't have to update my game because an anti-virus program got an update and is now identifying my VB scripts as viruses and I have to apply an emergency patch. That would just add insult to injury. We've had to upgrade our games plenty of times over the years, not because we found some bug, but because some third-party program, or driver, or whatever screwed it up."
"If Games for Windows Live maintains that strategy and they take over, I'm done," he added. "I'm not making PC games. I would be done.
DLC problems- http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2009/01/31/this-was-meant-to-be-a-fallout-3-dlc-review/1
The topic of the column is fairly simple too; explaining how totally awful Games for Windows Live is and how it’s lost Bethesda at least one customer as a result.
And it is truly bad, by the way. It’s not just a little flaky and irritating, like Steam was in the early days when everyone was just getting used to it. Games for Windows Live is more like the software equivalent of flossing with barbed wire. It’s negatively impacted on every game I’ve ever seen that features it.
Here was my plan for playing Bethesda’s new piece of downloadable content for Fallout 3; I’d nag Bethesda’s PR for a copy of the game, install it, play it, review it and then, if I liked it, go home and buy it to play there.
What actually happened was that I ended up writing this, my rage running so hot that the bile I’m spewing is practically boiling."Games for Windows Live is more like the software equivalent of flossing with barbed wire"
The review actually got off to a good start though and a keycode to download Operation Anchorage actually came through with no need for nagging, but everything after that was downhill.
I booted up Fallout 3 and opened Games for Windows Live. I tried to sign-in, but the game insisted that I hadn’t registered this game. I duly dredged up one of the review key-codes for the full game and registered, wondering why I hadn’t had to do this at install. Games for Windows said it needed to update and that a restart might be needed. I said OK and the game started updating both the game and the GFWL platform.
I restarted and re-launched the game and everything seemed to be working fine, except there was no marketplace option in Live and the downloads tab on Fallout’s main menu said that no new content was available. I checked the official site for the game and confirmed that, yes, the only way to get the game for PC is through Live.
The update must have failed, I thought. I signed out of GFWL, which Microsoft told me would stop me from being able to save, signed back in and…still nothing. The system was convinced it was up to date and wouldn’t auto-update anymore. I quit, went to Microsoft, manually downloaded the update, installed it and...still nothing."Did you know that Valve only has 13 people working on Steam?"
I fiddled, I fumbled, I recruited the rest of the office into helping me, but there seemed to be no way to fix the matter. Checking on how other game journos were doing revealed that the only proven fix was to completely re-install Games for Windows, then redo all the updates presumably.
It’s at that point I decided it probably wasn’t worth the effort. Early reports suggest the DLC is less than two hours long and weighs in at a 350MB download – if I spent much longer fiddling then I’d have spent more time installing it than playing it.
Luckily though, that mean I didn’t have to face the later annoyance of swapping my money for MS points and wondering why I can only buy them in batches of 500 or 1000, though the games only ever cost 1200 or 800.
"I fiddled, I fumbled, I recruited the rest of the office into helping me, but there seemed to be no way to fix the matter."
This isn’t the first time that Games for Windows Live has faced ire either – it’s been either broken or useless ever since it first drunkenly swaggered onto the scene and declared itself the new Steam in the way that only a Seinfeld-influenced Microsoft can. No game we’ve seen has benefitted from its inclusion.
Exactly why it’s so broken though fits in nicely with an idea I have and a bit of trivia I learned the other day. Did you know that Valve only has 13 people working on Steam? That’s because contrary to popular belief, Valve isn’t actually a huge company like, say Blizzard or Microsoft.
And that’s a good thing. 13 people may not seem like many, but smaller teams actually get things done faster in my experience. They’re more focused and dedicated, communicate more quickly and stand a better chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse. Big companies and big teams are the exact opposite – mainly because there’s more room to pass the buck around in.
13 people managed to get Steam to where it is today, bringing innovations like Steam Cloud with them, yet the whole of Microsoft’s Games for Windows team can’t even make it so I can download an expansion pack? That’s why not all the recent lay-offs are always a bad thing, even if I won’t be buying or reviewing Operation Anchorage after all.
Oh, and just for the record, it turns out that not only is Operation Anchorage already on Torrent sites, but it’s easier to download when pirated too. Good job, Microsoft.
I'll try and dig out an article from PC Gamer UK on GfWL, but I'm not sure if it's online.
