charlequin said:If they want to make it a vital and useful service it needs to actually fit with what works on a PC: a tiny, sleek executable that runs fast and hides in the background without gobbling RAM or CPU cycles; least-possible DRM; universal and region-free accounts with an extremely tolerant sign-in policy; sensible and sane ways of paying for things.
Billychu said:1- It runs on top of other services. I bought GTA IV on Steam. Not only do I have Steam running to play that game, but Games for Windows Live is also running at the same even though both are accomplishing the same thing
2- It's obtrusive. When I launch a game on Steam, the Steam overlay is completely optional and doesn't have to be seen. In a GFWL game, the overlay is constantly popping up, moving slowly, making noise, and pestering me. I do not want to have to associate my PC game with my Xbox profile just to save.
I don't have the numbers, but it's a safe assumption that more people buy games from Steam than from GFWL. Both services do basically the same thing. So why have two programs running? I don't think games should be Steamworks exclusive, but that's another topic.Da1nonly J said:1. Don't buy it on Steam?
I don't get why people expect a game using GWL sold on steam to not need GWL to run while they are playing it.
Let's say you were able to buy a game from the GWL marketplace like Modern Warfare 2 which uses Steamworks. You woluld have to install Steam to activate it if you didn't already have it, and wouldn't you need to be logged into Steam to play it???
How is that any different?
Da1nonly J said:1. Don't buy it on Steam?
I don't get why people expect a game using GWL sold on steam to not need GWL to run while they are playing it.
Let's say you were able to buy a game from the GWL marketplace like Modern Warfare 2 which uses Steamworks. You woluld have to install Steam to activate it if you didn't already have it, and wouldn't you need to be logged into Steam to play it???
How is that any different?
...damn.Stumpokapow said:Girlfriend bought Where's Waldo. I can't play it on the same computer she bought it on. I have no idea if this is by design or by defect.
Girlfriend boots up 360 while I'm playing RE5 on GFWL. Oops, signed out, because my tag was set to auto sign-in on 360. The reasoning behind this (prevent account sharers or frauds or whatever) is truly irrelevant to me. It negatively impacts me, so I don't like it.
Patching system is horrendous. With Steam, it auto-detects game patches and downloads them for me. With GFWL, I start the game, login with my gamertag. At this point it's probably been 30-45+ seconds. Oh, wait, game has a patch. Okay, let's patch it. Boom, game boots me out, and downloads and installs the patch. Okay, time to launch the game again. Oh wait, I have to sign in again.
But also, even if GFWL was exactly on par with Steam, why would I use it? I'm already running Steam 24/7. It has the same social functionality. It has achievements. If I wanted to "prevent Steam from gaining a monopoly", wouldn't I be rooting for the little guys, not Redmond, Washington?
And it's not on par. The selection is terrible, they don't have the truly epic sales the other guys have, they don't have any developer outreach in the indie community (with their only indie support being games that are on every other platforms). Efforts to improve the selection would mostly boil down to offering to sell me copies of games that I've already bought on other platforms, and efforts to secure better selection for the future will basically be the same.
Which is another thing. MS needs to stop being so schizophrenic with everything they do. Windows Phone 6.5. No, wait, Windows 7 but we'll still do 6.5. Here's the Kin! The Kin is cancelled! The Zune isn't cancelled but it's clearly not being supported. PC gaming is old, let's fire most of the GFW team, ignore the system for a year or more, and stop porting our games. Wait, now we like PC gaming, how come we don't have a foothold. The browser war is over, time to dismantle IE's team. Oh, no, now people don't use our outrageously shitty browser and developers hate us, I guess we'll set up the IE team again. Outside of MS's most very core products, their reliability for continued support is 0. I would trust some third-tier service like Greenhouse Games over GFW. The problem isn't that I doubt the sincerity of this change in direction, the problem is that I doubt there won't be another change in direction 12-18 months from now.
You say you want arguments for why GFW sucks besides "MS sucks, GFW sucks", but half the arguments for using GFW boil down to "It's Microsoft! And you can talk to your Microsoft friends! And use Microsoft achievements! How are those things better than anyone else's implementation? They're from Microsoft!"
When you say "Mindless rabble when get us nowhere", I disagree. Mindless rabble has worked spectacularly so far. I'm very happy with PC gaming. I'm very happy with Steam. I'm very happy that developers are increasingly abandoning GFWL. Mindless rabble has created an absolutely excellent situation right now. Ignoring the mindless rabble has gotten MS nowhere. Tough break, guys.
You had me at "girlfriend."Stumpokapow said:Girlfriend bought Where's Waldo. I can't play it on the same computer she bought it on. I have no idea if this is by design or by defect.
Girlfriend boots up 360 while I'm playing RE5 on GFWL. Oops, signed out, because my tag was set to auto sign-in on 360. The reasoning behind this (prevent account sharers or frauds or whatever) is truly irrelevant to me. It negatively impacts me, so I don't like it.
Patching system is horrendous. With Steam, it auto-detects game patches and downloads them for me. With GFWL, I start the game, login with my gamertag. At this point it's probably been 30-45+ seconds. Oh, wait, game has a patch. Okay, let's patch it. Boom, game boots me out, and downloads and installs the patch. Okay, time to launch the game again. Oh wait, I have to sign in again.
But also, even if GFWL was exactly on par with Steam, why would I use it? I'm already running Steam 24/7. It has the same social functionality. It has achievements. If I wanted to "prevent Steam from gaining a monopoly", wouldn't I be rooting for the little guys, not Redmond, Washington?
And it's not on par. The selection is terrible, they don't have the truly epic sales the other guys have, they don't have any developer outreach in the indie community (with their only indie support being games that are on every other platforms). Efforts to improve the selection would mostly boil down to offering to sell me copies of games that I've already bought on other platforms, and efforts to secure better selection for the future will basically be the same.
Which is another thing. MS needs to stop being so schizophrenic with everything they do. Windows Phone 6.5. No, wait, Windows 7 but we'll still do 6.5. Here's the Kin! The Kin is cancelled! The Zune isn't cancelled but it's clearly not being supported. PC gaming is old, let's fire most of the GFW team, ignore the system for a year or more, and stop porting our games. Wait, now we like PC gaming, how come we don't have a foothold. The browser war is over, time to dismantle IE's team. Oh, no, now people don't use our outrageously shitty browser and developers hate us, I guess we'll set up the IE team again. Outside of MS's most very core products, their reliability for continued support is 0. I would trust some third-tier service like Greenhouse Games over GFW. The problem isn't that I doubt the sincerity of this change in direction, the problem is that I doubt there won't be another change in direction 12-18 months from now.
You say you want arguments for why GFW sucks besides "MS sucks, GFW sucks", but half the arguments for using GFW boil down to "It's Microsoft! And you can talk to your Microsoft friends! And use Microsoft achievements! How are those things better than anyone else's implementation? They're from Microsoft!"
When you say "Mindless rabble when get us nowhere", I disagree. Mindless rabble has worked spectacularly so far. I'm very happy with PC gaming. I'm very happy with Steam. I'm very happy that developers are increasingly abandoning GFWL. Mindless rabble has created an absolutely excellent situation right now. Ignoring the mindless rabble has gotten MS nowhere. Tough break, guys.
speculawyer said:Just forget it. Steam won. I don't think we need both.
Stumpokapow said:Girlfriend bought Where's Waldo. I can't play it on the same computer she bought it on. I have no idea if this is by design or by defect.
Girlfriend boots up 360 while I'm playing RE5 on GFWL. Oops, signed out, because my tag was set to auto sign-in on 360. The reasoning behind this (prevent account sharers or frauds or whatever) is truly irrelevant to me. It negatively impacts me, so I don't like it.
Patching system is horrendous. With Steam, it auto-detects game patches and downloads them for me. With GFWL, I start the game, login with my gamertag. At this point it's probably been 30-45+ seconds. Oh, wait, game has a patch. Okay, let's patch it. Boom, game boots me out, and downloads and installs the patch. Okay, time to launch the game again. Oh wait, I have to sign in again.
But also, even if GFWL was exactly on par with Steam, why would I use it? I'm already running Steam 24/7. It has the same social functionality. It has achievements. If I wanted to "prevent Steam from gaining a monopoly", wouldn't I be rooting for the little guys, not Redmond, Washington?
And it's not on par. The selection is terrible, they don't have the truly epic sales the other guys have, they don't have any developer outreach in the indie community (with their only indie support being games that are on every other platforms). Efforts to improve the selection would mostly boil down to offering to sell me copies of games that I've already bought on other platforms, and efforts to secure better selection for the future will basically be the same.
Which is another thing. MS needs to stop being so schizophrenic with everything they do. Windows Phone 6.5. No, wait, Windows 7 but we'll still do 6.5. Here's the Kin! The Kin is cancelled! The Zune isn't cancelled but it's clearly not being supported. PC gaming is old, let's fire most of the GFW team, ignore the system for a year or more, and stop porting our games. Wait, now we like PC gaming, how come we don't have a foothold. The browser war is over, time to dismantle IE's team. Oh, no, now people don't use our outrageously shitty browser and developers hate us, I guess we'll set up the IE team again. Outside of MS's most very core products, their reliability for continued support is 0. I would trust some third-tier service like Greenhouse Games over GFW. The problem isn't that I doubt the sincerity of this change in direction, the problem is that I doubt there won't be another change in direction 12-18 months from now.
You say you want arguments for why GFW sucks besides "MS sucks, GFW sucks", but half the arguments for using GFW boil down to "It's Microsoft! And you can talk to your Microsoft friends! And use Microsoft achievements! How are those things better than anyone else's implementation? They're from Microsoft!"
When you say "Mindless rabble when get us nowhere", I disagree. Mindless rabble has worked spectacularly so far. I'm very happy with PC gaming. I'm very happy with Steam. I'm very happy that developers are increasingly abandoning GFWL. Mindless rabble has created an absolutely excellent situation right now. Ignoring the mindless rabble has gotten MS nowhere. Tough break, guys.
Zaraki_Kenpachi said:You want to know why your piece of shit software sucks Microsoft? It's because when I buy a game from you like Blacklight: Tango Down and go to play it, I physically can't. I've tried downloading my profile and updating the client 6 TIMES and I still can't play it. It doesn't work using the autoupdater in the game, fine. I try to download the client from your website and install that. Run Blacklight, download profile AGAIN and still says it's out of date. Why is the client on your own fucking website not the most up to date installer apparently? So I've now bought a game I can never play because your system is complete and utter shit. Never again.
Dynoro said:I don't have a lot of problems with GFWL tbh and a lot of issues I've seen would appear to be to be the game developer's issue and not an issue due to GFWL. However there are a number of ways they could improve:
- Worldwide invites: don't split by region
- Locked saves: sometimes you can copy saves over from your backup when you do an OS reload and sometimes you cannot. But I assume a lot of this is to prevent Gamerscore farming.
- The client is a bit bloaty compared to Steam and visibly slows games down as it opens even on a fast PC
-Uneven limit on installations: sometimes you get unlimited sometimes is 5 activations - why the difference (or even a limit) if its all through GFWL
-Doesn't integrate well with other DD services - If I buy a GFWL game through Steam that has Steamworks why do I need to go through GFWL integration at all?
Stumpokapow said:Girlfriend bought Where's Waldo. I can't play it on the same computer she bought it on. I have no idea if this is by design or by defect.
Girlfriend boots up 360 while I'm playing RE5 on GFWL. Oops, signed out, because my tag was set to auto sign-in on 360. The reasoning behind this (prevent account sharers or frauds or whatever) is truly irrelevant to me. It negatively impacts me, so I don't like it.
Patching system is horrendous. With Steam, it auto-detects game patches and downloads them for me. With GFWL, I start the game, login with my gamertag. At this point it's probably been 30-45+ seconds. Oh, wait, game has a patch. Okay, let's patch it. Boom, game boots me out, and downloads and installs the patch. Okay, time to launch the game again. Oh wait, I have to sign in again.
But also, even if GFWL was exactly on par with Steam, why would I use it? I'm already running Steam 24/7. It has the same social functionality. It has achievements. If I wanted to "prevent Steam from gaining a monopoly", wouldn't I be rooting for the little guys, not Redmond, Washington?
And it's not on par. The selection is terrible, they don't have the truly epic sales the other guys have, they don't have any developer outreach in the indie community (with their only indie support being games that are on every other platforms). Efforts to improve the selection would mostly boil down to offering to sell me copies of games that I've already bought on other platforms, and efforts to secure better selection for the future will basically be the same.
Which is another thing. MS needs to stop being so schizophrenic with everything they do. Windows Phone 6.5. No, wait, Windows 7 but we'll still do 6.5. Here's the Kin! The Kin is cancelled! The Zune isn't cancelled but it's clearly not being supported. PC gaming is old, let's fire most of the GFW team, ignore the system for a year or more, and stop porting our games. Wait, now we like PC gaming, how come we don't have a foothold. The browser war is over, time to dismantle IE's team. Oh, no, now people don't use our outrageously shitty browser and developers hate us, I guess we'll set up the IE team again. Outside of MS's most very core products, their reliability for continued support is 0. I would trust some third-tier service like Greenhouse Games over GFW. The problem isn't that I doubt the sincerity of this change in direction, the problem is that I doubt there won't be another change in direction 12-18 months from now.
You say you want arguments for why GFW sucks besides "MS sucks, GFW sucks", but half the arguments for using GFW boil down to "It's Microsoft! And you can talk to your Microsoft friends! And use Microsoft achievements! How are those things better than anyone else's implementation? They're from Microsoft!"
When you say "Mindless rabble when get us nowhere", I disagree. Mindless rabble has worked spectacularly so far. I'm very happy with PC gaming. I'm very happy with Steam. I'm very happy that developers are increasingly abandoning GFWL. Mindless rabble has created an absolutely excellent situation right now. Ignoring the mindless rabble has gotten MS nowhere. Tough break, guys.
charlequin said:The only suggestion that's really necessary is that Microsoft needs to make GFWL into an actual PC gaming system.
Look at 360. Why is Live so successful there? It's the most feature-complete software/network platform available in the console world, it's the most elegantly integrated into the hardware it runs on, it's got the most desirable features, it uses the paradigm it's built for in a great way to improve your entire experience with the system. It was clearly designed by people who "got" console gaming and wanted to make the most effective system possible for it.
GFWL (and actually all "Live" integration outside the Xbox) on the other hand has absolutely nothing to do with what actually works for PCs. It's region-based even though PCs are universal worldwide hardware. It's single login even though this actively worsens their integration features -- using GFWL removes my ability to use my 360 while I'm on it which means I actively want to avoid linking the two accounts if I can help it. It uses stupid and consumer-unfriendly DRM even though activation limits actively drive away more sales than they regain through piracy prevention.
If they want to make it a vital and useful service it needs to actually fit with what works on a PC: a tiny, sleek executable that runs fast and hides in the background without gobbling RAM or CPU cycles; least-possible DRM; universal and region-free accounts with an extremely tolerant sign-in policy; sensible and sane ways of paying for things.
If they want to try to do something better than Steam, they should look at what works about XBL and try to port some of that conceptually rather than just stamping it down directly. Letting different gamertags play the same game regardless of which tags "own it" once it's installed and earn achievements, store separate settings, etc. would be nice compared to Steam. Universal cloud storage of saves and settings would be nice. An expansion of XBL's controller-settings system could be great -- save default keybindings and mouse settings for a user that'd be automatically imported into every game, as well as autosuggesting graphical settings based on your hardware and pre-defined preferences so every new game doesn't have to involve that five-minute res/settings rejiggering process.
I don't see how anything remotely like that is possible unless MS decides they actually really, really care about PC gaming again which I don't see happening, though.
les papillons sexuels said:this thread is kinda funny.
It can be summed up in "If MS wants to succeed and compete against steamworks, MS should just buy valve"...
Snapshot King said:Hasn't been mentioned and I'm kind of shocked it hasn't. Maybe the term title update fools people on the Xbox side (and I have a problem with it there too) but if you're going to patch, give me the option to look at the fucking patch notes. Oh, there ARE no patch notes? Great.
On steam, theres the updates properties button. Failing that (and it does happen sometimes, most noticeably with GFWL games) I can also hit the news button which will almost always take me to a kotaku article that has the patch changes or comments from the developers on the patch.
Also unmentioned, I have a 360 controller I use for some PC games. If I'm playing a GFWL game, especially one thats also on 360, why can't I plug my 360 mic into my controller and have it work? That's bullshit. Not only does GFWL fail feature parity with Steam, it fails it with its own service on the Xbox, despite having easy methods for making it vastly superior to the console live experience.
John said:Stuff
I'll say.brain_stew said:Its an error that has been caused because of the new Xbox.com site redesign and the new Xbox Live subscriber agreement, but since the client hasn't been updated since it sends you to no where. You need to login through Xbox.com and update your subscriber agreement and it'll work. I ran into the same problem and I'm going to bring up the issue directly.
It was very poorly handled.
Snapshot King said:Hasn't been mentioned and I'm kind of shocked it hasn't. Maybe the term title update fools people on the Xbox side (and I have a problem with it there too) but if you're going to patch, give me the option to look at the fucking patch notes. Oh, there ARE no patch notes? Great.
On steam, theres the updates properties button. Failing that (and it does happen sometimes, most noticeably with GFWL games) I can also hit the news button which will almost always take me to a kotaku article that has the patch changes or comments from the developers on the patch.
Also unmentioned, I have a 360 controller I use for some PC games. If I'm playing a GFWL game, especially one thats also on 360, why can't I plug my 360 mic into my controller and have it work? That's bullshit. Not only does GFWL fail feature parity with Steam, it fails it with its own service on the Xbox, despite having easy methods for making it vastly superior to the console live experience.
Nailed it. IMO this forum would be better off if GFWL simply wasn't discussed.Htown said:I'll say.
I ran into the same thing just now, trying to see, for once, if anything was worth buying in the GFW Live store. (Bing rewards let you get MS points, apparently). Same thing. Error message leading to a nonexistent page. I had to search the error code (only four results found on Bing) to find the GFW Live forums which tells me I have to sign in to Xbox.com to fix this.
First of all, all you have to do is let me sign in and pop up a screen with updated TOS stuff as soon as I do. Then just lemme click yes. Plenty of programs do this. Second, the fact that the GFW Live program sends me to a website that no longer exists, and that I have to go to XBOX.com in order to fix the issue, shows EXACTLY where Microsoft's priorities lie. I don't even OWN an Xbox, why the FUCK do I have to go to the Xbox website to fix a problem with my Games for Windows program? You don't even care enough about the GFWL platform to let me access my account stuff from there? You don't even have a damn functional website for this platform you care so much about?
You know what? Fuck Microsoft. All this bullshit they trot out every few months about how much they REALLY TRULY CARE about the PC market is utter nonsense. This whole thread is pointless. GFW Live is never NOT going to suck, and it's NEVER going to be improved, for the simple reason that Microsoft is never EVER again going to put ANY emphasis on the gaming platform where you don't have to pay 60 bucks a year to be a part of it. END of story.
brain_stew said:It was very poorly handled.
brain_stew said:You can. You probably don't have it configured through the Windows "Sound" configuration tool but it does work and can be used in more than just GFWL titles.
CecilRousso said:There is a really simple answer to the question "why does it suck", and it is related to the answer to another question - What does GfWL bring to the ones that are satisfied with Steam?
Microsoft has to consider that we are many that are very satisfied with Steam. We buy the games through Steam because we like the service, and want to have a majority of our games in one place. Right now, GfWL only bring this:
1. Limited activations.
2. Restrictions to certain regions.
3. Almost everytime it also comes to another layer of DRM, like SecuRom.
4. And separate lists for achievements.
The benefits?
1. Gamescore.
And there are very few PC gamers who care about that gamerscore.
Right now, you can get the ones that don´t like Steam. Perhaps the ones that doesn´t care which service they get their games for. But the Steam supporters, what do you bring to them?
CecilRousso said:1. Limited activations.
3. Almost everytime it also comes to another layer of DRM, like SecuRom.