I didn't know all that about Witcher 2.

I might have to look into it now and see about picking it up.

What is steam?

Steam is a form of DRM, which is made because greedy publishers don't want the consumers to be able to sell the games they have bought with their hard earned money.

Steam's cloud storage for save games is awesome.

I bought torchlight of steam and played it for a bit on my laptop. It didn't run all that smoothly a couple of levels in so I tried it on my desktop. I started up the game and it directly continued where I left of on my laptop. The first time you see it working is quite magical.

PS3 in contrast does everything to discourage owning multiple consoles. From 'copying of this savegame data is not allowed' to can't play this game on another machine within 24 hours with gt5 prologue.

Cloud storage on consoles would have been very useful, both my launch 360 and ps3 died with all savegame data gone.

If you want people to show Microsoft that they don't want to pay for Live, it can happen two ways:

1) Everyone stops paying for Live and loses their Gold advantages, like online play. (NOT HAPPENING)

2) Every 360 owner buys another platform for online gaming, so they can stop playing their 360 online. (NOT HAPPENING)

I think this whole ordeal with "paying for Live is bad" is overrated. Yes, Steam is free and does many of the things Xbox Live does and more, but paying for Live on the Xbox is not bad by any means.

That's not to say that Microsoft are making the most of it, which I really think they should. I love that on Steam, you don't buy a version of the game like you do everywhere else, you buy something broader, because once you've bought it, it's yours to use on both Mac and PC. That's absolutely fantastic, and I wish Microsoft would leverage Live for that, especially now that they've expanded Live unto Windows Phone 7.

Also, you don't understand why Valve releases games on consoles? You of all people should know better MM, these guys are making a lot of money from the console versions and they're not holding the PC/Mac versions back in any way. The stupidest thing they could possibly do would be to stop developing console versions. And it's not like they're bringing all their games to consoles. DOTA 2 is decidedly a PC game with its focus on community and its gameplay, and so there won't be a console version. L4D, Portal and what have you, does not suffer from being brought to consoles by any stretch of the imagination.

And I don't really see how The Witcher 2 is supposed to be all that much of a great Steam game. The only thing you mentioned about it that isn't on Live is the cloud storage (I know you mentioned price, but amazon outdoes Steam, go figure), which is hardly all that. It's a nice thing to have, but I can't remember the last time where I wasn't gaming on my own PC.

And console games might be holding PC games back in a way, but with the great costs associated with pushing hardware boundaries these days, there isn't much point in trying to push games graphically. It's lovely to see games that look great and take advantage of their platform, but I don't think a lot of games actually gain much from being PC exclusive, other than being less restricted by the platform.

The newest high end PC hardware can set you back hundreds of dollars for a single component, it's crazy! How many developers in the world want to spend money on going after pleasing the people with this hardware? It's a small group after all, so setting the bar at console levels is fine by me. It just means I can get an affordable PC which can play great games in a great way.

I'm not saying Steam isn't the better service, I'm just saying that this whole thing is blown out of proportion.

I'd try it but I don't have any credit cards and refuse to use my debt card online. lol

As long as the PS3 is a Japanese system, they will never let anyone outside of Japan do firmware updates for it.  It's their engineering and there will not give up control over it.

3) ~400 million people (~200 million counting only the less casual part of PC gamers) playing on PC and consoles different from XB360 (HAPPENING)

Obviously #3 is effective only if MS ISN'T happy with just its tens million glad to pay.

The 360 is seeing record sales, it's selling incredibly well even though it's more than five years old, and a lot of consumers are buying Gold subscriptions. I think Microsoft are pretty happy with the results they're getting now and continue to get.

In low income countries people generally have PCs because they can pirate games easily. Atleast that's what I'm led to believe by an article I read about a Chinese developer.

However, if MS and Sony want to charge for online play in these countries they should use the WoW pay method in China. Wow players in China pay to play by the hour. I believe its just a few pennies an hour and its been quite successful.

1) Low income countries, partially yes, but China is different, as the biggest reason is that its laws still ban consoles. In mid income countries, not poor, but less rich than USA, console gaming exists and it's strong, but there usually Ninty and Sony overwhelme MS.

2) Totally agree. Paying for costly services like maintaining huge persistent massively multiplayer worlds or other premium services is usually considered acceptable by most. Despite what MS would wish, people perceive the difference from paying for things that are usually free. Paying for use, if the fee is modest, helps acceptance amongst people not playing too often, while a flat rate may be better for heavy gamers. Flexibility is of the essence, and it's a well known quality of Chinese businesspeople. MS OTOH has this old flaw of its of trying to force its business model on people by its sheer power.