I still want to give credit to Microsoft Game Studios. They took some big risks… adopting the Live service. They did the first Vista-only titles, and they did them early. And that’s the role of a first-party [developer], and there was a cost to that, and I wouldn’t want a third-party developer to [have to shoulder] that cost. A first-party developer had to do that.

Grade: C+
A super upbeat way of saying that someone higher up is calling the shots and wants MGS to focus on growing the market for Xbox 360 games, and that hopefully the focus will return to PC gaming in the future. Beats a lie. We get more promises of PC announcements coming down the line, but promises don’t run on Windows.

PCG: Releasing Vista-only games that don’t even employ DirectX 10 was a mistake.

KU: It was something we had to do. But from a [sales] perspective, we would have rethought that position.

Grade: D
PC Gamer could have told them that releasing Vista-only games that don’t even employ DirectX 10 was going to hurt sales (and, in fact, we did). But Kevin did acknowledge that doing so kicked sales of Halo and Shadowrun in the nuts, and maybe, in hindsight, it wasn’t the smartest thing the company has ever done.

PCG: Live for Windows has been very disappointing. We’ve begun using games that use that functionality as a negative in our reviews. Games for Windows Live can’t compete with services like Steam, Rebel.net, and even GPG.net, when those services are free.

KU: I think it is safe to say that we have paid very close attention as to what may be the inhibitors to people adopting Games for Windows Live, and you can expect that when we are ready to talk about what the next stage is, that we will address the concerns. And we’re going to [take] things in a different direction as well that I think people will like.

Games for Windows Live was developed a couple years ago as a portion of the Xbox Live work, meaning that the Xbox Live team said “oh, by the way, we’re also going to do this Games for Windows Live thing.” [The Games for Windows Live team] is now a completely separate team with exponentially more resources than it had in the past.

The opportunity here really is to focus on: What do PC gamers want? What do publishers want? What do the consumers want? How do the business models need to change? How does the user experience need to change? And so, without giving any details, I want your readers to understand that we have a bunch of people that are looking at that. I’m not thinking about the console. The rules of the console do not necessarily need to apply here. I want to build the best experience for PC gamers and now there’s a dedicated team [to do that], and their master is the PC gamer, and not just as a sibling of the console.

There are some assumptions you can make from that. That we’re going to make the right decisions, and be on the right path for what PC gamers want out of an online service. And we look at all of those other services. We look at Steam, we look at Gamespy, we look at GPG.net. We know that there are things that people like about those services. We think we can still differentiate. There are things we will do better. We’ve got to be very up-front about what we’re doing differently. When we’re ready to talk about what we’re doing, I think you’ll be pleased with what you hear.

Grade: B-
This is as close as you’ll ever hear Microsoft come to saying that it dropped the ball in a big way and that it’s now looking for the ball, picking it up, and trying to throw it back. Based on Unagst’s comments, our guess is that Live will be going completely free sometime in the next year, along with some significant and long-overdue upgrades. Still, we’ve got to be skeptical, because as much as we’d all love to believe that Microsoft is going to get its act together and live up to this latest round of promises, we’ve heard all this before.  So let’s just put it this way: when MS delivers a usable online gaming environment for the PC, we’ll be the first to congratulate them.

PCG: In Windows Vista, when I hit the Start button and type Conan, nothing comes up [Vista indexes all your programs and documents, letting you quickly search for and launch any application…unless it’s a game]. I’m being forced into the Games Explorer to launch my game, which feels like a ghettoization of games away from all the other programs. Why is that?

KU: That is something we’re fixing moving forward. That was not intentional. We’re fixing that …but I don’t have a date for the fix.

Grade: A
This is something we can all agree is good news! It’s reassuring to know that MS didn’t consciously try to force gamers into using a clunky games launcher every time we launch a game – though it’s also worrying that they missed it in the first place (how many gamers could have been on the Vista design and QA teams if they never noticed before launch?), and that we’re at Service Pack 1 already and this simple thing hasn’t been fixed yet. We’re waiting.

Jun 26, 2008