What Games For Windows Live needs to do to become relevant
It is undeniable that Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gaming service is regarded as pretty damn good – it has something like 17 million members, and all games on the Xbox 360 integrate into with it.
In the PC world, the bastard cousin of Xbox Live, Games For Windows Live (GFWL), has not fared so well. Only a handful of games make use of the service, and those that do usually suffer because of it. Original adoption of GFWL was always going to be poor – the service launched as a paid subscription service for both the developers and the end user – and in the PC world known for free gaming, that just wasn’t going to cut it. Thankfully late last year with the release of GFW v2, it was made free for both developers and end users – who now get access to all features (like the theoretical-but-in-reality-non-existent Xbox360 <-> PC gaming).
So why has GFWL still fared so poorly despite now being free? Because there is no value to it. I should clarify that. There are features offered by GFWL, but they don’t equate to much because of how poorly implemented or supported they are. The features offered by GFWL are:
- In the few games that support GFWL, you can talk to your “LIVE” friends. Don’t confuse these with the same friends on Live Messenger, that is a completely separate and isolated service.
- Achievement tracking
- Marketplace
In the desktop (or "out of game") client all you can do is connect to the marketplace – it is a glorified web browser. However there is so little content there is no reason you’d use the GFWL marketplace – seven demos, videos of games, and a few addons (although five of those are for Fallout!) You can’t purchase full games – there is no reason to use this over Steam!
The above screenshot is the login screen for the desktop GFWL client – look familiar? It should, it looks like the Windows Live Mesesnger login screen with a different skin applied to it. Surely this desktop client lets you talk to your LIVE friends? Nope! What about at least add/remove friends? Nope! The only way you can manage your friends is through a webpage (www.xbox.com) or through an XBox or XBox 360.
The isolated nature of LIVE friends and Live Messenger contacts lets far inferior chat networks/clients such as Steam or Xfire take over (inferior in terms of people on the networks and chat client features such as logging and less uglyness)
What Microsoft needs to do so that this is no longer taken as a joke is
- Turn the desktop client into more than a glorified browser – make it a chat client too.
Until you can talk to your LIVE friends at the desktop, the benefits of GFWL in game are also reduced. - Make the desktop client also talk to Messenger network and Messenger network talk to the "LIVE" network
If the two clients talked to the same networks, you could choose what IM client you wanted to use (ie, a gamer-centric client, or a general chat client). Perhaps the gamer-centric client could do in game overlays ala XFire/Steam (but not require them to be GFW/GFWL titles) - Get some content
Chicken and egg situation – not going to get the content there until it has the userbase, but the userbase is never going to move from Steam or other systems unless the content is there (which is why Steam had such a hard time when it started up).