DTS 7.1
May 29th, 2007, 07:57 PM
Good read. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2128054,00.asp
EDIT: The link to the podcast mentioned below is: http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3?http://zdmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/Podcasts/040607.mp3
Microsoft is Screwing Up Live on Vista
A year ago this month, at the last really big E3 ever, Microsoft announced its Live Anywhere initiative, promising to rapidly extend Xbox Live to the PC and cell phones. Finally, your Xbox Live friends list, achievements, Live Arcade, and all that other good stuff would be accessible on those other platforms with over 100 million gamers. I was absolutely giddy. They didn't show the service off per se, but rather had a mock-up demonstration of what it would be like. You'd be sitting there on your PC and someone on the Xbox 360 would see you online, invite you into a cross-platform game, and away you'd go. They'd send you a message, and you'd get it on your phone, PC, 360—wherever you happen to be. You could edit your Forza Motorsport 2 car on your PC and then take it out on the 360 to drive. Sure it was just a mock-up, but the idea was to say, "This is what we're going for."
This month, the first two Live PC games hit the market, first Halo 2 and then Shadowrun, and boy did Microsoft ever drop the ball on this one. Microsoft has set everything in place for Live on the PC to be a failure, and what's more, they're continually showing that their PR-speak claiming "we really care about the PC as a gaming platform" is 180 degrees out of alignment with their actions.
Live on the PC is nothing like that mock-up demo a year ago. It's Vista-only, which I guess I can understand. They want to move Vista as the gaming platform, not just Windows PCs in general. Perhaps Vista's networking security stuff is actually necessary for Live, I dunno. Okay, fine…we need to buy your expensive new OS to use Live. Fair enough. I can still sit there browsing the web and get a game invite or a message over Live, right? Or set up a Live voice or video chat? Nope. Live on the PC only runs while you're actually playing a Live-enabled game. So in order for my friends to see me online on my PC, I have to actually have Halo 2 or Shadowrun running. This sort of defeats the point, and it's not the way the 360 has worked for the last 18 months. I can sit at the dashboard, watch a movie, listen to music, or do whatever other non-game stuff on the 360 and still be fully connected to Live. So from a very core level, you get a second-tier experience on the PC, even though Live is coming to it much later.
Press Home on your keyboard when you're in a Live PC game and it acts like the big silver Guide button on your 360 controller. It brings up the Live menu, which looks exactly like the Guide on the 360. In fact, it looks too much like it. It's a very controller-centric interface, down to using controller buttons and icons. You can use your mouse on it, but it has clearly been designed for, well, a console. Mistake number two.
The biggest mistake Microsoft is making with Live on the PC is the way they're treating the PC as if it's a console platform they can control. They're trying to lock out the rest of the world and to charge for features that PC gamers have had for free for ages. It's a shortsighted, greedy scheme that could only come from a product manager or VP who simply doesn't "get" PC gaming. The free Silver level of Xbox Live lets you log in on the PC and earn Achievements just like you do on the 360—but only single-player Achievements. Multiplayer Achievements are only for those $50-a-year Gold members. Player matchmaking is for Gold members only. Voice in games is for Gold members only. Cross-platform play between 360 and PC is for Gold members only. In fact, the only thing silver members can really do is view a server list and hop onto a specific server.
The problem is, PC gamers have had a lot of this stuff free for years. We've had integrated voice chat in games for nearly a decade, and it's been free in most games. You can go back to Unreal Tournament 2003 (released in 2002) for an example of an old game with free voice chat, or look at the new Lord of the Rings Online (a Games for Windows branded game) for a more recent example. Gamers use Ventrillo or Teamspeak for games that don't have integrated voice components. They use Skype or various IM services for free messaging and voice chat. XFire is free, and it gives you messaging, in-game text chat, in-game voice chat, one-click joining the same server as your friends, and manages patches and downloads for lots of games. In many ways, it's twice what Live is on the PC, and it's free.
Our Microsoft PR contact, who has been a good sport about this article, tells us that both the free Silver and paid Gold accounts for Live on the PC will have voice chat in games. There will be no difference at all in voice functions between free and paid accounts. This has apparently changed recently: I was told differently by Microsoft back in March, and even VP Peter Moore had it the other way around in his recent interview with Games for Windows Magazine. Microsoft's own site for games still lists just "private chat via text and voice" for Silver accounts.
Live is a platform, and as such, it requires support from developers and publishers to be successful. Thus far, the only publisher to support it is Microsoft. When was the last time Microsoft announced a software or hardware platform with no third party support at all? Of course no developer is going to support Live on the PC. By doing so, they have to tell their customers accessing features that are free in other PC games is going to cost them money (and it's money to Microsoft, not the third-party publisher or developer!). The developers at Epic Games sum it up nicely, and you should really go take a listen to Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein on the April 6th version of the 1up Show, to hear why they aren't supporting Live on the PC with Unreal Tournament 3, and what Microsoft needs to do to fix it.
If you want publishers and gamers to embrace Live on the PC, you have to give them everything they get for free now, only better, and still free. That's the way the world works: People don't pay more to get less. Microsoft needs to make voice chat and matchmaking free on the PC. Let the pay users access cross-platform play and multiplayer Achievements. Build in new features (like system-wide clan support) that gamers are clamoring for as a way to add value to the pay tier. And where's the cool stuff like Live Arcade and Video Marketplace on PC? We want that stuff, too!
Somewhere in the bowels of Microsoft's game group is a product manager who truly believes that he's invented the wheel with Xbox Live and doesn't realize PC gamers have had most of its features free for years. He's blowing smoke up the ass of Peter Moore or Robbie Bach, telling them that developers will support Live on the PC because it's such a lovely integrated experience and so on and so forth. I know quite a few people in the games division at Microsoft who know all this…they clearly "get it." Someone needs to screw their courage to the sticking-place, go over their boss's heads, and send a brutally honest letter to an executive up in the "signs their paychecks" level of Microsoft's corporate ladder. Something like that letter J Allard sent out that got Microsoft to take the Internet seriously ("Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet").
If you happen to be such a high-level executive and you're reading this, I'd like you to ask the leaders of the Live project on Windows why there isn't a solid line-up of third-party support for Live on the PC this year. And don't accept wishy-washy answers about "growing the platform," because you wouldn't accept that from the Xbox team. You wouldn't go on sale with the Xbox 360 with nothing but a handful of Microsoft games for the first year and no third-party support announced at all, even for the future.
Microsoft doesn't just need a wake-up call about Live on the PC, their whole PC gaming strategy needs a swift kick in the ass.
Microsoft continually stresses how much they view the PC, particularly Windows Vista, as a gaming platform. It's important to them, it's the second pillar right next to the Xbox, yadda yadda. Their marketing and messaging is clear, but their actions tell a different story.
Tell me, does a company that cares as deeply about the success of Windows as a gaming platform as it does about the Xbox wait two and a half years to bring their big hit first-person shooter to the PC? No, but that's what they've done with Halo 2. What's more, they're charging full price for it—a nearly three-year-old game that costs $30 new on the Xbox costs $50 on the PC. It looks like a three year old game, too…visually, it's dramatically inferior to other current AAA PC games. Given how deeply this game is integrated into Live and how they want to make the "real" Live experience a paid subscription thing on the PC, they should be giving away the PC version of Halo 2 with every copy of Vista. At the very least, it should be a budget title. Just when the Xbox 360 owners get all hyped up about the vastly superior Halo 3, the Vista users get a port of a 2.5-year-old game they should have had access to simultaneously with Xbox owners back in 2004. This does not demonstrate that Microsoft cares about the PC as a game platform as much as their console business; in fact, it clearly demonstrates the opposite.
Oh, but it doesn't end there. You know that great Xbox Live Arcade game Geometry Wars that everyone loves so much? It's $5 on the Xbox 360, but the Vista version somehow costs $7.95. That's right, it's 60% more expensive and you don't even get Achievements added to your gamerscore. Luxor 2 on Vista is $20 from the MSN Games site, double what you pay for it on the Xbox 360. Way to show those PC gamers how much you care, Microsoft!
Just look at the release of big games from Microsoft's own game publishing arm, Microsoft Game Studios, for the calendar year 2007. On the Xbox 360, it's got:
Crackdown
Forza Motorsport 2
Shadowrun
Too Human
Mass Effect
Halo 3
Blue Dragon
Lost Odyssey
Alan Wake
Project Gotham Racing 4
Not to mention smaller games like Fuzion Frenzy 2 and Tenchu Z. What are they publishing on the PC side? Shadowrun, Halo 2, Jade Empire, and Alan Wake. Two of their whopping four PC games this year are ports of old Xbox 1 games that are, frankly, past their prime and coincide with much cooler releases from the same developers on the Xbox 360 (Halo 3 from Bungie and Mass Effect from Bioware). The other two are also appearing on the Xbox 360. That's right, Microsoft cares so much about Windows gaming that they are publishing exactly zero triple-A Windows exclusives this year. Microsoft is spending probably a few hundred million dollars in development and marketing of its own Xbox 360 games this year. That dwarfs their financial investment in PC games.
Update: It's worse than I thought: Microsoft didn't publish Jade Empire on the PC, though it was the publisher of the game on the original Xbox. 2K Games publishes the PC version. So Microsoft itself cares enough about games on Windows to publish only three PC games this year, all of which are also on the Xbox 360 or Xbox. Microsoft Game Studios' publishing efforts on the Xbox 360 outnumbers those on the PC by 4:1, mostly with games that will not appear on the PC. Does that sound like a company that is serious about PC gaming to you?
We could have had Gears of War released on the PC at the same time as the Xbox 360—the game was developed on PCs, and could easily be fitted to be a proper PC game. The genre and the way the game plays is a natural fit for the mouse and keyboard. Or at the very least, it could be released this month, right when Live on Vista is ready to go. But it's clearly more important to Microsoft that they use Gears to sell Xbox 360s, which is totally fine, but it once again demonstrates that Windows gaming is a clear second-fiddle to the console business in Microsoft's view.
If Microsoft wanted to demonstrate with their actions that Windows gaming truly means a lot to them, they'd start putting their money where their mouth is. Publish triple-A Windows exclusives where it makes sense. Don't take your premier PC developers like Ensemble Studios and have them make real-time strategy games (best suited for the PC) and task them with making an RTS exclusive to the Xbox 360 like Halo Wars. Publish your first-party games like Gears of War, Forza Motorsport 2, and Halo 3—games with a natural fit for the PC—at the same time they appear on the 360, or at least, don't make us wait more than a month or two.
Go to developers like Epic Games and say, "Tell us what we need to change about Live on the PC to get you to support it," and make those changes as fast as possible. Here's a hint: Epic Games makes a game engine licensed by damn near everyone under the sun these days. If Live support is built into Unreal Tournament 3, it's going to be turn-key simple for their huge list of licensees to support it as well. Delay the release of Live on the PC until you can make it a system-level component so that we don't need to run a Live-enabled game in order to be connected to Live (and yes, I know that means delaying Halo 2 and Shadowrun, but it's the right thing to do).
Not everything Microsoft is doing with regards to PC gaming is as horribly insulting and obviously backward as their Live strategy or their own publishing decisions. The Games for Windows branding and certification program is a good idea. Setting some basic standards with regards to how games should behave (such as mandatory widescreen support and support for 64-bit Windows) and rewarding games that pass muster with a unified packaging and logo program is a good thing. Pushing the brand in retail with marketing dollars is good and necessary, though I have to wonder whether the retail push marketing dollars will dry up in 2008, when Vista is no longer new. Building support for ESRB ratings into Vista's parental controls is a similar good idea. This stuff is nice, but it's a drop in the proverbial bucket, and from the same company that puts forth so many more resources to really drive the console market forward.
Microsoft: It's not too late. Your much-vaunted "PC gaming renaissance" is not over before it has started. Vista is still new, and there's still time to put the proper resources behind the PC version of Live and your own PC game publishing to clearly demonstrate that you have what it takes to show the world what a first-class gaming platform the PC can be. Just put down the Xbox flavored Kool-Aid for a minute and start listening to your customers and PC developers again.
EDIT: The link to the podcast mentioned below is: http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3?http://zdmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/Podcasts/040607.mp3
Microsoft is Screwing Up Live on Vista
A year ago this month, at the last really big E3 ever, Microsoft announced its Live Anywhere initiative, promising to rapidly extend Xbox Live to the PC and cell phones. Finally, your Xbox Live friends list, achievements, Live Arcade, and all that other good stuff would be accessible on those other platforms with over 100 million gamers. I was absolutely giddy. They didn't show the service off per se, but rather had a mock-up demonstration of what it would be like. You'd be sitting there on your PC and someone on the Xbox 360 would see you online, invite you into a cross-platform game, and away you'd go. They'd send you a message, and you'd get it on your phone, PC, 360—wherever you happen to be. You could edit your Forza Motorsport 2 car on your PC and then take it out on the 360 to drive. Sure it was just a mock-up, but the idea was to say, "This is what we're going for."
This month, the first two Live PC games hit the market, first Halo 2 and then Shadowrun, and boy did Microsoft ever drop the ball on this one. Microsoft has set everything in place for Live on the PC to be a failure, and what's more, they're continually showing that their PR-speak claiming "we really care about the PC as a gaming platform" is 180 degrees out of alignment with their actions.
Live on the PC is nothing like that mock-up demo a year ago. It's Vista-only, which I guess I can understand. They want to move Vista as the gaming platform, not just Windows PCs in general. Perhaps Vista's networking security stuff is actually necessary for Live, I dunno. Okay, fine…we need to buy your expensive new OS to use Live. Fair enough. I can still sit there browsing the web and get a game invite or a message over Live, right? Or set up a Live voice or video chat? Nope. Live on the PC only runs while you're actually playing a Live-enabled game. So in order for my friends to see me online on my PC, I have to actually have Halo 2 or Shadowrun running. This sort of defeats the point, and it's not the way the 360 has worked for the last 18 months. I can sit at the dashboard, watch a movie, listen to music, or do whatever other non-game stuff on the 360 and still be fully connected to Live. So from a very core level, you get a second-tier experience on the PC, even though Live is coming to it much later.
Press Home on your keyboard when you're in a Live PC game and it acts like the big silver Guide button on your 360 controller. It brings up the Live menu, which looks exactly like the Guide on the 360. In fact, it looks too much like it. It's a very controller-centric interface, down to using controller buttons and icons. You can use your mouse on it, but it has clearly been designed for, well, a console. Mistake number two.
The biggest mistake Microsoft is making with Live on the PC is the way they're treating the PC as if it's a console platform they can control. They're trying to lock out the rest of the world and to charge for features that PC gamers have had for free for ages. It's a shortsighted, greedy scheme that could only come from a product manager or VP who simply doesn't "get" PC gaming. The free Silver level of Xbox Live lets you log in on the PC and earn Achievements just like you do on the 360—but only single-player Achievements. Multiplayer Achievements are only for those $50-a-year Gold members. Player matchmaking is for Gold members only. Voice in games is for Gold members only. Cross-platform play between 360 and PC is for Gold members only. In fact, the only thing silver members can really do is view a server list and hop onto a specific server.
The problem is, PC gamers have had a lot of this stuff free for years. We've had integrated voice chat in games for nearly a decade, and it's been free in most games. You can go back to Unreal Tournament 2003 (released in 2002) for an example of an old game with free voice chat, or look at the new Lord of the Rings Online (a Games for Windows branded game) for a more recent example. Gamers use Ventrillo or Teamspeak for games that don't have integrated voice components. They use Skype or various IM services for free messaging and voice chat. XFire is free, and it gives you messaging, in-game text chat, in-game voice chat, one-click joining the same server as your friends, and manages patches and downloads for lots of games. In many ways, it's twice what Live is on the PC, and it's free.
Our Microsoft PR contact, who has been a good sport about this article, tells us that both the free Silver and paid Gold accounts for Live on the PC will have voice chat in games. There will be no difference at all in voice functions between free and paid accounts. This has apparently changed recently: I was told differently by Microsoft back in March, and even VP Peter Moore had it the other way around in his recent interview with Games for Windows Magazine. Microsoft's own site for games still lists just "private chat via text and voice" for Silver accounts.
Live is a platform, and as such, it requires support from developers and publishers to be successful. Thus far, the only publisher to support it is Microsoft. When was the last time Microsoft announced a software or hardware platform with no third party support at all? Of course no developer is going to support Live on the PC. By doing so, they have to tell their customers accessing features that are free in other PC games is going to cost them money (and it's money to Microsoft, not the third-party publisher or developer!). The developers at Epic Games sum it up nicely, and you should really go take a listen to Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein on the April 6th version of the 1up Show, to hear why they aren't supporting Live on the PC with Unreal Tournament 3, and what Microsoft needs to do to fix it.
If you want publishers and gamers to embrace Live on the PC, you have to give them everything they get for free now, only better, and still free. That's the way the world works: People don't pay more to get less. Microsoft needs to make voice chat and matchmaking free on the PC. Let the pay users access cross-platform play and multiplayer Achievements. Build in new features (like system-wide clan support) that gamers are clamoring for as a way to add value to the pay tier. And where's the cool stuff like Live Arcade and Video Marketplace on PC? We want that stuff, too!
Somewhere in the bowels of Microsoft's game group is a product manager who truly believes that he's invented the wheel with Xbox Live and doesn't realize PC gamers have had most of its features free for years. He's blowing smoke up the ass of Peter Moore or Robbie Bach, telling them that developers will support Live on the PC because it's such a lovely integrated experience and so on and so forth. I know quite a few people in the games division at Microsoft who know all this…they clearly "get it." Someone needs to screw their courage to the sticking-place, go over their boss's heads, and send a brutally honest letter to an executive up in the "signs their paychecks" level of Microsoft's corporate ladder. Something like that letter J Allard sent out that got Microsoft to take the Internet seriously ("Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet").
If you happen to be such a high-level executive and you're reading this, I'd like you to ask the leaders of the Live project on Windows why there isn't a solid line-up of third-party support for Live on the PC this year. And don't accept wishy-washy answers about "growing the platform," because you wouldn't accept that from the Xbox team. You wouldn't go on sale with the Xbox 360 with nothing but a handful of Microsoft games for the first year and no third-party support announced at all, even for the future.
Microsoft doesn't just need a wake-up call about Live on the PC, their whole PC gaming strategy needs a swift kick in the ass.
Microsoft continually stresses how much they view the PC, particularly Windows Vista, as a gaming platform. It's important to them, it's the second pillar right next to the Xbox, yadda yadda. Their marketing and messaging is clear, but their actions tell a different story.
Tell me, does a company that cares as deeply about the success of Windows as a gaming platform as it does about the Xbox wait two and a half years to bring their big hit first-person shooter to the PC? No, but that's what they've done with Halo 2. What's more, they're charging full price for it—a nearly three-year-old game that costs $30 new on the Xbox costs $50 on the PC. It looks like a three year old game, too…visually, it's dramatically inferior to other current AAA PC games. Given how deeply this game is integrated into Live and how they want to make the "real" Live experience a paid subscription thing on the PC, they should be giving away the PC version of Halo 2 with every copy of Vista. At the very least, it should be a budget title. Just when the Xbox 360 owners get all hyped up about the vastly superior Halo 3, the Vista users get a port of a 2.5-year-old game they should have had access to simultaneously with Xbox owners back in 2004. This does not demonstrate that Microsoft cares about the PC as a game platform as much as their console business; in fact, it clearly demonstrates the opposite.
Oh, but it doesn't end there. You know that great Xbox Live Arcade game Geometry Wars that everyone loves so much? It's $5 on the Xbox 360, but the Vista version somehow costs $7.95. That's right, it's 60% more expensive and you don't even get Achievements added to your gamerscore. Luxor 2 on Vista is $20 from the MSN Games site, double what you pay for it on the Xbox 360. Way to show those PC gamers how much you care, Microsoft!
Just look at the release of big games from Microsoft's own game publishing arm, Microsoft Game Studios, for the calendar year 2007. On the Xbox 360, it's got:
Crackdown
Forza Motorsport 2
Shadowrun
Too Human
Mass Effect
Halo 3
Blue Dragon
Lost Odyssey
Alan Wake
Project Gotham Racing 4
Not to mention smaller games like Fuzion Frenzy 2 and Tenchu Z. What are they publishing on the PC side? Shadowrun, Halo 2, Jade Empire, and Alan Wake. Two of their whopping four PC games this year are ports of old Xbox 1 games that are, frankly, past their prime and coincide with much cooler releases from the same developers on the Xbox 360 (Halo 3 from Bungie and Mass Effect from Bioware). The other two are also appearing on the Xbox 360. That's right, Microsoft cares so much about Windows gaming that they are publishing exactly zero triple-A Windows exclusives this year. Microsoft is spending probably a few hundred million dollars in development and marketing of its own Xbox 360 games this year. That dwarfs their financial investment in PC games.
Update: It's worse than I thought: Microsoft didn't publish Jade Empire on the PC, though it was the publisher of the game on the original Xbox. 2K Games publishes the PC version. So Microsoft itself cares enough about games on Windows to publish only three PC games this year, all of which are also on the Xbox 360 or Xbox. Microsoft Game Studios' publishing efforts on the Xbox 360 outnumbers those on the PC by 4:1, mostly with games that will not appear on the PC. Does that sound like a company that is serious about PC gaming to you?
We could have had Gears of War released on the PC at the same time as the Xbox 360—the game was developed on PCs, and could easily be fitted to be a proper PC game. The genre and the way the game plays is a natural fit for the mouse and keyboard. Or at the very least, it could be released this month, right when Live on Vista is ready to go. But it's clearly more important to Microsoft that they use Gears to sell Xbox 360s, which is totally fine, but it once again demonstrates that Windows gaming is a clear second-fiddle to the console business in Microsoft's view.
If Microsoft wanted to demonstrate with their actions that Windows gaming truly means a lot to them, they'd start putting their money where their mouth is. Publish triple-A Windows exclusives where it makes sense. Don't take your premier PC developers like Ensemble Studios and have them make real-time strategy games (best suited for the PC) and task them with making an RTS exclusive to the Xbox 360 like Halo Wars. Publish your first-party games like Gears of War, Forza Motorsport 2, and Halo 3—games with a natural fit for the PC—at the same time they appear on the 360, or at least, don't make us wait more than a month or two.
Go to developers like Epic Games and say, "Tell us what we need to change about Live on the PC to get you to support it," and make those changes as fast as possible. Here's a hint: Epic Games makes a game engine licensed by damn near everyone under the sun these days. If Live support is built into Unreal Tournament 3, it's going to be turn-key simple for their huge list of licensees to support it as well. Delay the release of Live on the PC until you can make it a system-level component so that we don't need to run a Live-enabled game in order to be connected to Live (and yes, I know that means delaying Halo 2 and Shadowrun, but it's the right thing to do).
Not everything Microsoft is doing with regards to PC gaming is as horribly insulting and obviously backward as their Live strategy or their own publishing decisions. The Games for Windows branding and certification program is a good idea. Setting some basic standards with regards to how games should behave (such as mandatory widescreen support and support for 64-bit Windows) and rewarding games that pass muster with a unified packaging and logo program is a good thing. Pushing the brand in retail with marketing dollars is good and necessary, though I have to wonder whether the retail push marketing dollars will dry up in 2008, when Vista is no longer new. Building support for ESRB ratings into Vista's parental controls is a similar good idea. This stuff is nice, but it's a drop in the proverbial bucket, and from the same company that puts forth so many more resources to really drive the console market forward.
Microsoft: It's not too late. Your much-vaunted "PC gaming renaissance" is not over before it has started. Vista is still new, and there's still time to put the proper resources behind the PC version of Live and your own PC game publishing to clearly demonstrate that you have what it takes to show the world what a first-class gaming platform the PC can be. Just put down the Xbox flavored Kool-Aid for a minute and start listening to your customers and PC developers again.