Microsoft's Games for Windows Live service has the power to make grown men cry. Tears of blood.
It seems that even Microsoft know it. Well, kind of. Senior producer of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business, Kevin Unangst, has been speaking to CVG about the service's “rocky” start. He seems to think the main issue with the service is the lack of games. We're more concerned by the system sucking, whether we're trying to find a DOW: II Last Stand partner or trying to access our save games when the servers go down. Basically, it's stopped us playing our games when we want to and nothing makes us sadder than that. There's a reason why Dawn of War II switched from GFWL to Steam for Retribution . It works better.
Read on for more on the future of GFWL. Brace for impact.
According to Unangst, "The service started with the right intent, which was to bring Achievements, friends, multiplayer gaming and matchmaking in a really great way to PC. I think because it was designed originally as a partner to the console service more than the PC service, we had a rocky start.”
The senior producer believe that a lack of games was one of the main issues: "We didn't back it up with the most important thing, which is doing fantastic games to take advantage of the service. A network by itself isn't valuable - there needs to be great games to take advantage."
"I look at it as like what Halo did for Xbox Live where you had Bungie and Microsoft going back and saying 'to make a great multiplayer game here's some things I need in the service, here's my audience.' The Age of Empire team has got a lot of great input and the same can be said for Lionhead, who said 'we're going to build Fable 3 on the PC' and know what they want out of the service.”
We think it'll take more than a few killer apps to redefine how we think about GFWL. But what about you? Do you agree with Kevin Unangst's optimism?
