I dunno why i'm smiling.

Next is MCC

Wow, something completely went by without any rumors. I like that there are still some surprises in the industry.

I wonder how good it will be? They don't want to discourage people from getting an Xbox One I would assume, but they want more people playing Halo. Interesting.

China also has an exclusive Call of Duty online.  Damnit make these available in the US, I would try them!

When it comes to Call of Duty Online coming to the west I have good hopes, as they switched development to an American developer (Raven Software). But yeah, hopefully all of thse games will come to a wider audience.

Ka-pi96 said: Slade6alpha said: Next is MCC Hopefully as an exclusive to Microsoft's own digital distrubtion platform set up to compete with Steam.

lol that would be suicide. Steam is the 5,000 ton behemoth in the PC gaming space, even massive efforts like Origin are merely tolerated as a necessary evil to play certain games. Better to align with Steam than try to go around them. I can pretty much guarantee that EA would have sold more via Steam than by insisting on Origin. And I am not even one of those people who is militantly against Origin/EA. I had some issues with the browser plugins being a bitch from time to time, but overall I think the design is okay.

It's just that adding yet ANOTHER GFWL type of software would be a mess. Why? Well on the MS 'XBPC' or whatever portal, you might have up to a few dozen games (far less than that in all probability for a long time though). Wow, that's totally worth installing or having another software middleman for. Whereas on the Steam side you have tens of thousands of titles and libraries available.

Now integrating Steam more with Windows 10 would be the smartest way to go. Have the Microsoft Store app interconnected with Steam, and offer easy ways to buy games that qualify as 'apps' (playable on all windows devices) via Steam or MS Store. And have Steam be the place where MS PC-x86 DX12 games are available for purchase. The right kind of corporate partnership there would greatly benefit both parties.

Let me put it this way, Microsoft trying to go around Steam will be just as successful as Valve trying to go around Windows : iow, a disaster at worst, a mediocre also-ran at best.

Me sad. Want Russia goddies.

Today didn't happen. I'm convinced.

Finally Halo returns to the PC! F2P is disappointing.

They could make it work, but it would needlessly divide the PC gaming community, and almost certainly lose money by taking that path.

Let's say that by going with Steam, they would hit 800M revenue quarterly at some benchmark time, and worked out a deal where the fees were set at ~20%. That's 640M sales revenue. Now let's say that by avoiding Steam and that absolutely massive audience, they lose 33% of actual sales due to people not being willing to go through an additional route to buy their games, their CC is already linked with steam, they have a backlog, they don't see it, whatever. That 800M then becomes 528M.

So basically they have to ask themselves two questions :

1- Are they so proud that they'd be willing to lose money in order to avoid partnering with a company that is already responsible for greatly expanding and maintaining PC gaming (and by extension : tens of millions of PC users using and upgrading Windows installations over the years)?

2- If they would make more money by getting XX% of their sales via Steam, would they be happier than 100% of sales for less total income on their own, such as GFWL.

Honestly there's very little incentive to try to reinvent the wheel after the fact YET AGAIN, when this is the perfect opportunity to just walk in and start raking cash in.

Think about the MS M.O. for the past decade :

"Ohh iPod is making $$, let's make the Zune!"

"Ohh iPhone is making $$, let's make a smartphone series!"

"Ohh iPad is making $$, let's make a tablet!!"

Notice a similarity in all of these things? Trying to break into a marketplace that already has a solid victor (or two). Now for the above examples, they had no choice really : it was either try to make a device to gain entry to the market, or not to try at all. All of the above attempts of Microsofts have either ended in abject failure, or relegated them to bit-player status in the market at large, with by any respectable accounts only losses to show in the total scheme of things when factoring in various write-downs, R&D, marketing, etc.

Now they come to that same crossroads : an established market with tons of money being made.

Reinvent the wheel and risk it all against a titanic opponent? (terrible plan)

or simply take advantage of an open door to billions of dollars? (wonderful plan)