Mr Puggsly said:

Maybe I was giving an example that MS didn't give a shit about PC gaming? They started showing intrest in PC gaming again recently. They've announced three games that should be coming next year. More could be in the works.

And I was saying that history has shown that MS don't give a shit about PC gaming. They've made announcements in the past of supporting or pushing PC gaming, then they closed down all of their PC based developers. Forgive me if I'm sceptical about MS being serious in the PC scene.

It doesn't matter whats out there. They just need to create killer apps to attract people. Xbox Live became a success in a world with plenty of free options out there.

What free options? They have a monopoly on the 360. All other competing services are on competing consoles or PC making it indirect competition where their are many variables associated. You get a 360, you have to pay to play online, there is no other option on the 360.  On PC, it's a direct comparison and competition between multiple free services.

Halo 2 was strong... back in 2004. The PC port didn't come until mid 2007. By then Halo fans were already going ape shit with Halo 3 just around the corner and it wasn't for the PC.

You consider Shadowrun a strong online game? GTFO!

You're absolutely oblivious to this topic or you're playing dumb.

Actually, you just reiterated my point. My point was that MS seem to think these kinds of tactics work.We both can see it was a stupid idea, yet they advertised Shadowrun as a top cross-platform multiplayer title and they thought a 2.5 yr port of an original X-box title would be strong enough to push people to pay for the service. Since then, they haven't even tried a cross-platform game. Why? Because whilst they will say they're serious about the PC, their actions have always said the opposite.

Until they can give GFWL the full support it needs to compete with services like Steam, it will always be seen as the poor version of X-box Live.

How do you know its minimal? All MS has to do is keep adding games and keep put up deals. You are just being obnoxious and you have no idea what they'll be doing in the future.

How do you know it's anything more than minimal? Where is all the buzz you've seen being generated? A few media sites advertised and announced the sale. Most other DD services get that sort of coverage on a monthly basis. Steam has it virtually every week.

All the dev support is moving away from GFWL, bigger publishers are pushing either Steam or their own DD services, and where are the announcements for the number of active customers on GFWL? MS are always proud to announce the number of X-box Live users, why not show how many are using GFWL? Valve announce every year how Steam is growing but we have yet to see how well GFWL is doing.

And no, I have no idea what they're adding in the future (neither do you for that matter), but I want it to be more than they're doing at the moment. Why is that obnoxious? It's obnoxious to want something to improve?

PR? You mean the stupid crap people post on the interweb? That really killed the 360, huh?

You're just trying to put whatever negative spin you can on it.

MS as much as admited the service was lagging behind it's competitors and needed improving. It's no good forcing people to use a service which is comparatively poor. Yes the interweb is full of complaints, but many are serious and fundamental problems the 360 never had (or were quickly fixed in the case of RROD). This isn't so much negative spin as it is more about a poor product being forced on consumers.

Anecdotally, if you force people to use a poor service they will resent it. Steam had similar problems on release and even now, I know people that refuse to use the service, even after all the improvements.  

Note, I haven't once said that GFWL is doomed to failure, but it needs to improve a lot and I'm not convinced MS are taking the problems and complaints seriously.

No, reviews aside the sales were piss poor. I think the closing of the studio was proof of that.

Just Dance had piss poor reviews and mega sales.

I own Shadowrun.

but you didn't use it you just used the GFW web store to get a non GFWL enabled game, the web store has it's on problems but the thread is more about GWL which apparently you have never used.

BTW you are lucky you live in one of the 7 countries that you can use games on demand in

Its pretty clear your last post was biased. This one is still a little obnoxious, but considerably more reasonable.

I'm pretty confident MS will improve the service, you're skeptical.

We can keep going in circles but lets just move.

Bias against a service that's heavily criticised, needs significant improvement and has needed significant improvement for quite a few years from a company that has continually announced they will be improving the service but have constantly failed to do so? Why yes then, I am bias (and skeptical), and for good reason (which have been outlined in this thread by myself and others).

And my posts were obnoxious how? How exactly was it obnoxious considering I was making valid criticisms which you seemingly ignore. Obnoxious would be me calling the service shit with no reasonable criticisms. You disagreeing with my criticisms does not make my post obnoxious. If anything, you not arguing my points appropriately and just classing my posts as obnoxious is far more objecionable than any of the content in my posts.

What part of lets move on don't you get?

Many people use the service and think its fine.

As a user service, I'd like to see improvments and more added content which we have seen. More is likely coming.

I would have happily moved on if you hadn't undertaken a personal attack and accused me of obnoxious behaviour, especially considerring I made valid criticisms and observations of a service and the actions of the company that run the service (and not any criticism of you directly). You can't just accuse someone of being obnoxious and then say "let's move on" and expect them to reciprocate.

@ the underlined

I agree and hope they do, but I'm not sure they will do enough to compete. There seems to be a conflict of interest with the X-box team. I get the distinct feeling from interviews and announcements a good number at MS want it to improve, but are having difficulties implementing due to bureaucracy from higher ups and/or X-box division guys.

Fable 3 is a good example of a game they aimed to release side by side with the 360 version, but ended up delaying the PC version. I really hope they do sort all this out as I want to play Fable 3 and Age of Empires Online but I don't want the problems I had in Fallout 3 to plague my furture purchases.

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/