I think it’s a little crazy to think that MS is operating under the sinister motives of trying to kill PC gaming and much more likely that MS is simply operating under the misguided/shortsighted motives of “This Live stuff makes us money for avatar clothes, let’s get PC gaming generating stupid revenue too!”
They don’t want to kill PC gaming, but they’d love to turn it into a system where they can control the content, and if that kills PC gaming in the process, they’ll just say it was dying anyway and fail to see their responsibility in hastening its demise.
Since when was 172 MB a “big” patch? That seems pretty small by today’s standards. Steam just applied a 326MB patch to Empire Total War in a few minutes… (complete with moving progress bar)
It’s a big patch because GFWL models itself after Xbox Live’s method of updating, which is to block everything else as it’s patching. It’s meant to be fast, as the progress bar goes quickly across the screen and be done in a few seconds. It’s not meant to go on for over a minute. How does Xbox Live achieve this? By having a limit on the size of the patch. Patches over Xbox Live can only be so big, which is why they’re always fast to update.
A 172 MB patch is definitely a lot bigger than the size allowed over Xbox Live. And yet, it still uses the same method that’s fine for little patches, but when you turn your computer over and can’t do anything on it except to watch a progress bar that seems to refuse to move across the screen, it becomes an issue.
This seems a mighty strange conclusion to come to. Gamespy is awful and that’s what Borderlands uses, so of course it’s not going to work very well. And yes, it would probably have worked better with GFWL, because a tin-can-and-baling-wire network system would work better than Gamespy. But this is a mark against Gamespy, not for Live. There are plenty of games on PC that use neither system for coop matchmaking and work beautifully.
I’ll add a couple quick things… QT3 users aren’t the mainstream, we have loads of people who request GFWL support on our forums for our titles so it is fairly far from the “universal disdain” that some folks around here purport it to be.
RE5 and SFIV GFWL has worked fine and dandy for our users, giving pretty much the same experience as the X360 versions. Secondarily, it was easy for our teams to integrate and test when starting from an existing XBL integration. That means a lot.
Microsoft always “gets there eventually”. While you may not be satisfied today, in the future, you may be.
They aren’t games I normally play on the computer. Having to give up live just to play them with better graphics wouldn’t have been worth it. Especially for SFIV since then it would have been a single player only game without live.
That doesn’t compute for me - Live is the only form of matchmaking that you find acceptable? Or are you saying you wouldn’t have bought SF4 without multiplayer?
The game is so much better on the Xbox 360 because of Live.
Uh, I thought you were talking about Games for WINDOWS Live. Telling me the game is so much better on the XBox 360 doesn’t tell me anything about GFWL.
Run into this again. My old GFW copy of Gears of War for Windows just ‘exceeded its activation limit’ for the CD key and I have to call into the GFW support line to escalate it (I have to send them a photo of the box proving I own it) for a callback within 48 hours for them to give me a new key.
GFW fucking sucks. This will no doubt happen to a few more GFW games I reinstall in the next few days if they’ve run into their unknown, arbitrary, undisclosed install limit since I go through hardware upgrades so often.
Fuckers. Fucking GFW. (The support line people are nice enough though so I’m not abusive in any way towards them)
Are there different versions of GFWL? When I register a game using a GFWL serial, it gets locked into my account similar to Steam. It’s a one off thing and it’s permanent. I’m confused. :P
