How Hard Does Microsoft Push GFW Live on Developers?
By Chris on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 1:04 PM PST In Computer, Game Companies, Game Platforms, Gamer Life, Games, Microsoft
With any sort of service like GFW Live, support from developers is the number one hurdle to overcome. If you don’t have any games on your service, then it’s worthless. Obviously, things coming out of Microsoft like Halo are going to support Live, but that doesn’t nearly mean as much to PC gamers as Half-Life (with Steam) does.
So just how much work does Microsoft do in trying to gain developer support? 1UP asked Games for Windows head Kevin Unangst, who explained what the process is like.
Are you aggressively courting these companies, or are you simply throwing it out there and saying, “here’s our solution. If you like it, we’re here?”
We evangelize our technologies. We have a sizable team that goes out and does that, and it’s an important part of our success in terms of encouraging developers to adopt those technologies. Frankly, as a result of that outreach with the existing product and the offering of Games for Windows, we learned a lot and learned what developers want. Another example of where we’ve changed is that, there’s about a third less technical requirements for games to support Games for Windows Live, in terms of the tests that they have to go through when they’re connecting to our Live network. We took a number of those requirements off to make it even easier, essentially, for those games to add Live.
And we’ve actually heard a lot from happy developers who say, “I know that on the console, achievements drive a lot of sales and interest in my game.” So I think you’re going to see, not only multiplayer games, but also a lot of single-player games that may be great games that you play in a single-player mode that’ll want to add access to the friends list and potentially downloadable content and just awarding achievements in a PC game. I play on both platforms and there are games that I prefer, even though I’m a predominantly PC gamer, that I want to play on the console because I can get achievements that I can send back to my Gamertag. I think all of those things are true and are more interesting to developers now, and we continue to evangelize all those scenarios.
Dawn of War II and Fallout 3 are major games to support GFW, and while they’re certainly a start, Microsoft needs more than that. I can’t imagine a scenario where they’d convince Blizzard to do it (they have Battle.net, after all), but think about Starcraft II supporting GFW Live. Now that would be a killer app.
Thats a joke… even thinking of putting GFW onto blizzard or valve. Seems like its only going to games that have a hard time holding onto its audience and games that are trying to hit big that never will.
“but think about Starcraft II supporting GFW Live. Now that would be a killer app.”
That is something that will never happen do inpart to Battle.net. This whole GFW thing is pure BS no matter how you cut it. PC Gamers are use to and expect their multi-player FPS’s and RTS’s to be free unlike the people who only know Xbox Live and the money they have to shell out to play simple multiplayer on not so stable servers. Though in the end GFW will blow up in M$’s faces even if they supposedly have made/will make it free because Xbox Live users will want their multiplayer to be as well.
I Think Microsoft has A very good idea going here.With So many people owning 360s, they should try to accomomplish other thongs. Example 1. lets say you own a 360 a and a good a.. PC,wouldnt you want to be earning gamerscore while Playing PC exclusives?Syncing your XBOX Live And Wihndows Live would be great.
Example 2:lets say your like me,who owns a Very Costly PC(Alienware)but your A lot of your friends have 360s and you like to talk to them while playing games or even on windows live messanger.this is what microsoft hopes to do.there already making windows live Gold FREE so why wouldnt you take advantage of Pwning Console gamers on Gears of War?