| Mr Puggsly said: Valid points? You just say the same crap most people on forums say. Just dwell on the negative crap, show your bias against MS, and ignore any posibility of GFW becoming a major competitor. All GFW needs to do to compete is keep having great deals, keep adding content, and get exclusive content. That's all Steam basically did to become the leader. If MS truly desired they could buy their way into being the dominant distributor of PC games. Distributing PC games probably isn't incredibly profitable though. Atleast when compared to console profits. I don't believe they said Fable 3 was being released at the same time as the 360 version. Nor was it really delayed because we weren't given an offical release date. I presumed it wouldn't come until after the holidays. PC gamers generally get the shaft for obvious reasons. |
If anything, you've just shown your bias for MS and GFWL (and against PC gamers with that last scentence). All that stuff you call negative crap are valid complaints and criticisms. I have no idea why you don't seem to understand that much of the criticism is actually contructive if MS listened to it.
And you're wrong if you think that's all Steam/Valve did to become market leader (think of how crappy Steam was on release). That obviously helped a lot but they also improved the interface (would be nice if GFWL had a seperate interface program to launch games for instance), optimised it to use less resources, have things like Steamworks which saves your games online, introduce cross-platform play with Mac (which MS seem to think is not a good idea anymore when I'd love to face up against my mates on 360), allowed users to buy a game on PC and play on Mac (and vice versa), gifitng games to friends and having unlimited installs. Those were off the top of my head and I'm sure their are plenty more. All those little things add up to provide a good value service.
Also, how do you know distributing PC games isn't more profitable? DD on any platform should be more profitable than physical sales. You effectively cut out the retailer and the packaging costs. See this for more info:
http://www.mcvuk.com/features/808/OPINION-Retail-vs-Steam
Admitedly for MS, they may get a decent amount for first-party 360 games for being the platform holder as well as dev and publisher, but digital distribution should still be highly profitable.
As for Fable 3, I'm pretty sure they orginally said it was to release with the 360 version (although more to push Win7 apparently) and later announced it wouldn't release with the 360 version:
http://www.product-reviews.net/2010/08/03/fable-3-pc-release-date-delayed/
