News Games for Windows Live - expanded and free

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/07/23/games-for-windows-live-expanded-and-free/1

Games for Windows Live - the PC mirror of the Xbox Live service, is going completely free and will be expanded to include new content.

 

They finally realised it was ridiculous.

 

Finally. I guess MS clued in that apart from MMOs, where you really shouldn't be paying for the content, but rather the gameplay, nobody pays to play online.

Granted, in 90% of those cases, servers are privately hosted, but at least in private hosting, you don't always have to worry about being banned from one = bricked game.

I do wonder what this means for people sitting on a year of PC Gold Time.... do they get a refund, or shafted?

 

Never used it, but it's free, so it's better than before IMO

 

Live was and still should be an XBox only feature.
We PC gamers use a thing called the 'internet' to get demos. Wallpapers, News, Videos etc and best of all its free and simple!
Steam Will always win here as it allows Users to Host Games and dedicated servers for nothing, Live forces you to use their hosted servers etc this will always be there downfall.

 

Only ever tried it on gears of war, and couldn't get past the second chapter of the single player because of it, either due to repeated crashes at the menu screen, or it deleting all my saves on the few occasions it actually worked. Free or not, it's still a sack of ****.

 

Kinda worked ok for me, but when we have such easy access to the internet, it is pretty useless.

 

interestingly i just bought shadowrun (for 5 bucks)...now i can play it online for free (actually haven't installed it yet).

hope people still play it....

 

Just shows how good valve are if they made steam and are not really trying

 

I didnt know they had a live service for pc...... and Im still laughing that they charged for it.....they need to wake up on the 360 as well...

Oh and no worries about ppl with tons of gold time already bought, they all own macs anyway "It wont install.... why"

 

I'm pretty sure the reason that Valve is able to make such consistently good products is the fact that they are indeed trying.

 

That's correct.All of their stuff is at such a high level of quality that it actually looks very easy when you look at how well all of the products come together but it's actually a very difficult and time consuming process.

 

Yea, but those of us who have xbox live on our xbox's don't really get any benifits from this, considering we have already splashed out £35 for a years sub to play on our 360's. I don't actually mind paying £35 a year for a damn good service, that's never failed for me, and has so so much available on it, and that's expanding also. The only times i have problems with live is when my internet connection messes about.

Sam

 

As outrageous as I find it, windows live is definitely earning M$ money on the xbox. I'm glad they finally realised the market is Significantly different on PC. Windows live drove me batsh*t insane when I was trying to play gears of war, I actually think I might still hate it even when it's free. Best of luck to them though, they'll certainly need it to beat the perfection that is steam.

 

Personally I have never used Windows Live, as all my games are too old (about to buy Commander Keen )
Steam should be the standard and should be licensed out to other companies, as long as they are still interoperable.

 

good, because it was getting so that if you didn't have windows live, you couldn't really do a lot of things for certain new games, ala gears of war for pc

 

they finally relised how ludicras the charge is. Now all we need is it removed from xbox 360. Paying £35 a year or whatever it is. Is still really way too much consideirng most 360 games are hosted by the person who created the game

 

I've never tried Games for Windows Live, but I use Steam on a regular basis. While it has come a long way since being introduced in September 2003 there still are some major annoyances with the service. Only yesterday I repeatedly got booted off servers due to some "Steam connection lost" error. And the ClientRegistry.blob "fix" is almost legendary among Steam users...

 

I didn't know there WAS a Games for Windows Live!! Though even if I did. I certainly wouldn't have paid for it.

I'll have to look into it.