shio on 01 February 2009
| Domicinator said: Newsflash for the article writer and for anyone else: That's how PC gaming can be. Steam was more than "flaky" at the beginning of its life. It practically broke one of the most highly anticipated and highly praised PC games of all time: Half Life 2. When you finally got the game home, unpackaged it, and started installing it, there were several nightmares in your future. The first one was that you had to install Steam to play the game. The second one was that after installing 5 CDs worth of game files, Steam had to unlock all of them, which at the time was taking about 40 minutes on average. The third nightmare was that sometimes the unlock process would stall out half way through and either cause you to have to start completely over, or sometimes even reinstall the game. Steam is great now, but it had its issues in the past and almost everyone hated it. EA's Link service was the same way. Even without the download services, a simple patch on a PC game can ruin your install. Ever played a Battlefield game? Ever played Oblivion? Nothing is worse than putting about 30 hours into an RPG and then have your save game rendered completely useless by a patch. It's just part of PC gaming. And even after you get through all that BS when getting a new game or a new patch, there's usually a GPU driver you need to. It can literally take two hours of sitting in front of the computer BEFORE you start playing a brand new PC game. From what I've seen and heard, Microsoft is going to try to duplicate Xbox Live for their GFW Live platform. They are already taking steps to do it. Whether you love Xbox Live or hate it, it is a VERY successful platform. As long as it is free and works as well as Xbox Live does, PC gamers are going to love GFW live when it is firing on all cylinders. Back when I was PC gaming full time, I would have welcomed a more unified platform like this. As long as they have the staff and bandwidth to support it, it should do well. |
Your post is silly. Steam is far superior than Xbox Live, and one of GFWL's biggest criticisms is that it feels like a straight port of XBL (and that is not a good thing). Steam's beginning wasn't the best, but right now it's easily the best online platform.
And I call BS on needing years to make a steady service: Impulse only came out 6 months ago and is already a great effort. If Impulse does what it promised this year it will become the second best service, beating Xbox Live.
