Exactly.
I suspect that the whole "Games for Windows" push and the Xbox Live for Windows project are both aiming to take the current gaming market they've built on the 360 and move it over to to the PC if this generation ends and the 360 hasn't returned a profit.
Why else would they be porting Live (a service and a system which are supposed to be a selling point of the Xbox line) over to the same PC that everyone already owns?
MS's business model is immensely profitable...if you subtract the hardware costs. The hardware is what's put them in the 5 billion dollar hole and I'm sure the extending of warranties due to the RROD ain't making it any easier. Besides, most FF games wind up on the PC anyway. MS could just as easily charge their licensing fees there for any game which intends to make use of Live, sell controllers and other peripherals designed to make use of "Games for Windows" and they'd finally be free of the burden of making hardware.
"I mean, c'mon, Viva Pinata, a game with massive marketing, didn't sell worth a damn to the "sophisticated" 360 audience, despite near-universal praise--is that a sign that 360 owners are a bunch of casual ignoramuses that can't get their heads around a 'gardening' sim? Of course not. So let's please stop trying to micro-analyze one game out of hundreds and using it as the poster child for why good, non-1st party, games can't sell on Wii. (Everyone frequenting this site knows this is nonsense, and yet some of you just can't let it go because it's the only scab you have left to pick at after all your other "Wii will phail1!!1" straw men arguments have been put to the torch.)" - exindguy on Boom Blocks
