Scoobes said:
The "Game for Windows" banner is seperate from "Games for Windows LIVE" (GFWL). The important part is the LIVE bit. The "Games for Windows" basically mean "This is a game that runs on Windows!" and is fairly pointless tbh. GFWL is a seperate system that was designed to be the PC equivalent to X-box Live. It has the advantage of sharing your account with X-box Live (if you have one) and acheivements but unfortunately is relatively poor (especially earlier incarnations) when compared to Steam. In general it's just not well supported especially compared to the X-box equivalent. Skyrim actually uses Steam (you can't play it without) and has the great advantage of using Steam workshop to host user mods and automatically install them. All DLC will be available via Steam too. |
It's gotten a bit better. But in general it's not more cumbersome than Xbox Live or PSN network.
It's just on a PC this isn't the norm. I have to say, though steam is my prefered service. And it initially sucked because it was a requirement for half-life 2 (which had really limited use for online... sound familiar? :P).
Shooting down any service that isn't steam, making it sort of a monopoly I don't think is a good viewpoint(I'm not saying you in particular but a lot of PC gamers tend to have). Particularly when it's own service was initially poor, and brought on this whole idea of having software to run software etc. Having more online services... probably lowers prices as well as other things (EA's had some really good deals on origin for instance) as well as it makes each service strive to get better and not ecclipsed like say what happend with myspace to facebook.
This does in turn, does create a lot of other issues. But I'm not a fan of it must be on steam. I'm a general fan of no steam, GFWL, Origin in general. GOG and Direct2Drive (though its gamefly) doesn't require anything.
