Source: http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2009/01/31/this-was-meant-to-be-a-fallout-3-dlc-review/1

This was meant to be a Fallout 3 DLC review

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 31st January 2009

Comments (43) Email to a friend Stumble

It’s at that point I decided it probably wasn’t worth the effort. Early reports suggest the DLC is less than two hours long and weighs in at a 350MB download – if I spent much longer fiddling then I’d have spent more time installing it than playing it.

Luckily though, that mean I didn’t have to face the later annoyance of swapping my money for MS points and wondering why I can only buy them in batches of 500 or 1000, though the games only ever cost 1200 or 800.

"I fiddled, I fumbled, I recruited the rest of the office into helping me, but there seemed to be no way to fix the matter."

This isn’t the first time that Games for Windows Live has faced ire either – it’s been either broken or useless ever since it first drunkenly swaggered onto the scene and declared itself the new Steam in the way that only a Seinfeld-influenced Microsoft can. No game we’ve seen has benefitted from its inclusion.

Exactly why it’s so broken though fits in nicely with an idea I have and a bit of trivia I learned the other day. Did you know that Valve only has 13 people working on Steam? That’s because contrary to popular belief, Valve isn’t actually a huge company like, say Blizzard or Microsoft.

And that’s a good thing. 13 people may not seem like many, but smaller teams actually get things done faster in my experience. They’re more focused and dedicated, communicate more quickly and stand a better chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse. Big companies and big teams are the exact opposite – mainly because there’s more room to pass the buck around in.

13 people managed to get Steam to where it is today, bringing innovations like Steam Cloud with them, yet the whole of Microsoft’s Games for Windows team can’t even make it so I can download an expansion pack? That’s why not all the recent lay-offs are always a bad thing, even if I won’t be buying or reviewing Operation Anchorage after all.

Oh, and just for the record, it turns out that not only is Operation Anchorage already on Torrent sites, but it’s easier to download when pirated too. Good job, Microsoft.

I'm sorry but wtf. I have to agree, Microsoft's developers, and typically pretty damn good software developers at that, can't make a program work better than the 13 people at Valve? There is a serious issue here.

I dont understand how hard is it to make a game client that works for Microsoft. StarDock and Valve both have good clients. Xfire, while not a game purchasing client, is a free game chat and communication client with the ability to download game demoes and stuff AND it works well.

I know this article states a  reason but why cant a multi billion dollar software company's developers not make a game client like Steam? why?

How many people work on Windows Live?

way more than 13.. no idea exactly but I expect over 50.

Is there any information about this?

no but a website like Bit-Tech would have a good idea. This is why the article writer stated the number of Steam programmers.

I hear horror stories about PCs all the time. This is just the continuing story of gaming on your PC. Maybe it's Microsoft's fault. Maybe it's not. I know that Xbox Live on 360 works just fine, but I do pay $30 a year for the privilige of having it work so well. Games for Windows is free right? Well you get what you pay for. A few things I noticed too:

1. When did this gentleman contact Microsoft? It seems he tried a million things, but I can't find one sentence or statement involving him e-mailing or calling Microsoft about this.

2. I have to question the credibility of a journalist that was given free content to review, yet will dodge his job writing about it just because he doesn't want to break some principle he has of spending more time installing than playing it. I wonder what Bethesda will think of giving this guy reviewable content in the future.

Interesting stuff. It is definitely true that the more people working on a project, the less work each individual contributes to the end product due to increased communications, dependencies, etc. I actually do wonder how many people M$ has on each of their big projects. If they are anything like my company, they are about as un-agile as can be. M$ should just let Steam have all the apples. And hopefully Steam will not have to expand a great deal the bigger they get.

I looked into it and here is the Steam Group of the makers of Steam.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/Steam

Looks like there are 29 people in the group.  Wonder what the other 16 people who are not developers do?

LOL.  And judging by their stats, they do not play on Steam very often.

I'm sorry, but "you get what you pay for" doesn't work well here. People may expect to pay for that stuff on consoles, but that's not how it works on the PC (unless we're talking about something like an MMO). In fact, one of Windows Live biggest failures was the fact that they wanted to have a gold/silver version of it. There was no real quality there, you would be gimped on available features unless you shelled out. Yes, they eventually did away with charging this past summer, but the damage had been done. It also doesn't help that it's like they ctrl+C and ctrl+v'd Xbox Live into Windows Live on top of charging for it.

If "you get what you pay for" is supposed to be an argument, then Valve and Steam must be some sort of black magic, huh? I'm not saying Steam is perfect, but they've come a VERY long way since 2004.

You get what you pay for isn't an argument meant to say that all free content is bad and all paid content is good. It's meant to say that if it's free and it doesn't work, then tough shit. You're not paying for it. I have plenty of programs on my comp that were free, and a whole bunch of them are absolute crap. Many of them have equivalent programs you must pay for and I hear they're much better. It's fantastic that Steam is free and it works well. That doesn't mean Windows Live needs to also work well. It's a free service. If it doesn't work, then just don't use it. Leave it alone. It's not like you're paying for it. If enough people don't use it, it'll just go away. This is a gentleman that is well aware of the problems on Live for Windows, and yet he still tortures himself with making it work.

Hey I've got Yaris, Dash of Destruction and Aegis Wing on my Xbox Live. They are free games. One of them is cool, the other two are garbage, but you're never going to see anybody making a big fuss about their quality. Why? Because they're free. The most they can waste is your time.