An “open-letter” email from John Schappert -- a corporate vice president from Microsoft we hadn’t heard of until now -- kicked off Microsoft’s “Big Picture” event on June 25 in San Francisco intended to showcase a slew of new Games for Windows games. The email cited, among other things, the “continued success with the Games for Windows branding initiative, which adds prominence, a quality and technical bar, and a consistent look and feel to the retail PC gaming experience.”

Well, OK. The boxes do look nice. But PC gaming has enjoyed some hefty advancements over the past year in sales figures, hardware, and software, we wouldn’t have put the Games for Windows initiative behind them. In fact, we’d say it’s the efforts of third-party developers like Crytek and innovative publishers including Stardock and Valve that have pushed the platform so far ahead this year. So, after an initial public briefing with Kevin Unangst, Senior Global Director of Games for Windows, PC Gamer sat down with Unangst for a private chat about the progress – or lack thereof – of the Games for Windows initiative.

Here are Kevin’s responses to some of the mean things we said about the progress of Games for Windows and Games for Windows Live in the past year, followed by a fair-but-firm grade on each response for candor, clarity, and lack of gaseousness.

PC Gamer: The vast majority of our readers don’t perceive Games for Windows as having done anything for them or for PC gaming beyond an initial push that seemed to have sputtered out.

Kevin Unangst: I think your readers in particular are probably the ones that have stuck with PC gaming throughout, and those are the ones that, frankly, the initiative wasn’t targeted at, so that’s not surprising. Our initial target was to buy back some real estate back in the stores. So our investments [went toward] encouraging publishers to continue to invest in and put some toward the PC market.

We could have done a better job articulating early on the technical value that we were promoting [with the Games for Windows program]. It’s very easy for someone to say “It’s just an advertising and branding campaign; it doesn’t particularly help me.” Wait a minute. We’d like them to think, “Hey, Microsoft spending millions of dollars to promote gaming on Windows in any form is a good thing.” And we haven’t taken enough credit for the quality push. The two examples I use consistently are widescreen support and 64-bit support. To the hardcore -- those are the ones that are on the boards complaining that “oh crap I’ve got a new Dell 30-inch monitor and my game still runs at 4:3 and I’ve got black bars. This sucks!” Well, guess what -- we don’t allow that under Games for Windows. The developer gives us a build and we say, “Hey, you’re not scaling properly, so you don’t get the brand.”

I think there’s been a lot under the hood that benefits PC gamers now and [will benefit them] in the future, so hopefully we can do a better job of articulating the value of that. Games for Windows Live is [also] a huge investment for us, and I think you’re audience will see more value from that moving ahead. 

Grade: B
We hold Microsoft responsible for not making its goals clearer at the outset, since it set expectations for the Games for Windows initiative high and subsequently under-delivered, but Unangst makes a good point about the initial target of the Games for Windows push. When PC gamers look at computers we see gaming rigs, but in this sense we’re in the minority, and Kevin’s point was that the initial effort was aimed at letting everyone else know that it’s likely that they already have a great gaming machine in their houses or will have one soon. And Games for Windows has, admittedly, established some decent standards, including support for widescreen monitors and 64-bit Vista, although the latter doesn’t seem nearly as important to us as it does to Microsoft.

PCG: Valve is taking a leadership position with all the services associated Steam Cloud (including centralized storage and access of saved games and configuration files). This is the kind of thing gamers expected from the Games for Windows initiative and Games for Windows Live, but didn’t get.

KU: There’s a mix of things we can’t talk about yet. [Initially] we took what was a console-based system and said “How do we bring that over without sacrificing what people like about Windows?” I think we got some things right, and [there were] some things that we needed to change. And we’ll talk more about those things at some future date. But as an example, today with Games for Windows Live you can store settings up in the cloud and bring them down on any PC. We’ve not communicated that enough. We’ve got nine titles that have shipped using Games for Windows Live and we’ve not been strong evangelists about that.