Games For Windows Live - Epic's Not Thrilled

In popular gaming site 1UP.com’s recent podcast, Epic’s founder Sweeney and Vice President Rein admitted their doubts in the recently announced Games for Windows Live service. They said that although the service had potential, the fact that most of the features require you to pay for them might make it unappealing to PC gamers. Here are their words:

“The key problem with the service right now is that any feature that Microsoft implements and charges for, the developer can’t implement themselves.

As a PC developer, we’re used to having complete freedom and defining our feature set—what we can give gamers and what they can do in our game. That’s a big change, quite a huge change, for PC developers to now have features that we simply can’t do.

We’ll wholeheartedly jump onto Games for Windows [Live] if it evolved into the sort of system that’s compatible with gamers’ expectations on the PC platform.”

We agree with you completely Sweeney and Rein. The Xbox Live service on the 360 is brilliant, and we can understand that they charge customers for it. But on the PC platform, it just doesn’t make sense to charge gamers for something that they’ve always had free. Call us PC gamers spoilt if you wish, but as Sweeney says, we expect to play online for free after we’ve purchased copies of any titles, unless they’re subscription based MMOs.

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