Opinion: Games for Windows Live is Awful, Microsoft Doesn't Care, and Why it Won't Matter Soon

Since its debut with Shadowrun and Halo 2 in May 2007, Games for Windows Live has done little but create ill will between Microsoft and PC gamers. Despite repeated insistence that it will improve given time, Microsoft's actions have spoken much louder, and crystal clear: it's demonstrated a neglectful attitude and an unwillingness to compete with Steam's dominance. Yet for some reason refuses to simply pull the plug and put GFWL out of its misery, instead inviting developers to integrate it to their games and bogging down great games like Batman: Arkham City with its inferior and annoying system. The good news is that whether Microsoft will admit it or not, by almost all indications GFWL doesn't have much of a future.


What is Games for Windows Live?

There's a lot of confusion as to what the words "Games for Windows Live" actually mean, and why they inspire such dread in so many PC gamers when uttered in connection with an anticipated game. Part of that is thanks to some truly awful branding by Microsoft. Not to be confused with its benign brother, plain-old Games for Windows label (which isn't actually software), or the now-defunct Games for Windows Marketplace, GFWL is the Windows side of the Xbox Live network, except without any of the features that make Xbox Live interesting or useful. It does multiplayer matchmaking, a rudimentary friends list, email-like text chat, voice chat, syncing settings over the cloud, cross-platform play (in three games from 2007/2008) and achievement tracking. That's the extent of its features, and every single one of them is markedly inferior to Steam. When the stars align, GFWL works well enough that I can pretend it's not there, but that's the highest praise I can give it.


The problems run deeper than a clumsily designed interface that makes things as simple as asking a friend "Hey, want to play a game with me?" (or replying) harder than they need to be. I have personally encountered all of these problems: installation issues, rendering saved games inaccessible (particularly with Batman games), requiring system reboots for minor updates, and requiring PC gamers to buy Microsoft points to buy DLC. Anecdotally, I've heard gamers outside of North America complain of regional restrictions that prevent GFWL games from working at all in their countries. And annoyingly, people with both PCs and Xboxes complain that they can't log into both at the same time -- if someone else is using Xbox Live to stream Netflix in the other room, logging in on your PC boots them out.

I'm also frustrated by major feature shortcomings. For example, I can only see if friends are online if I'm already in a game -- there is no desktop application that allows me to see notifications that a friend is playing and join them. I can't even upload a custom avatar image, for crying out loud.

The only group I've ever heard utter a kind word toward GFWL are the self-proclaimed Achievement Whores, gamers who will buy even the worst games to nudge their Xbox Live Gamerscore a little higher. If the only feature that anybody likes about your product is that it makes a completely meaningless number tick up, you are doing it wrong.


With all of these crippling problems, why would a publisher ever decide to use GFWL at all? It's easier -- if a cross-platform game has already been built to work with Xbox Live, it's a relatively simple process to convert it to GFWL. But if there were ever an example of the idea that nothing worth doing is easy, it would be GFWL. It's a quick, easy, sloppy solution that only barely works, and it's not worth the backlash from gamers who've been burned by it in the past when the alternative services are so vastly better.

There Is No Hope

All of that is arguably fixable, and it's certainly true that seven or eight years ago Steam wasn't a whole lot better or well-liked by gamers. But Valve stuck with it, and gradually improved Steam to the point where today it's beloved by most, with the exception of the staunchly anti-online crowd. That's the reason I've completely lost faith that GFWL will ever significantly improve: the utter lack of updates or progress.

I tried to remember the last time Games for Windows Live added a new feature, however insignificant. I couldn't, and I couldn't find a changelog anywhere detailing the evolution of GFWL, which is now on version 3.5.92.0, because Microsoft doesn't maintain one. So I Googled "Games for Windows Live adds." Limiting the search to the past year, I got five results. Of those, only one refers to something that happened in the past year: the addition of new achievements to Section 8: Prejudice. Doesn't count. The rest are links to a story about the addition of Games on Demand downloads, which happened in December 2009, and are more a feature of Games for Windows Marketplace than GFWL. (It has since moved to its new home at Xbox.com.)


I expanded the search to two years. This time I got seven results, which included two additional links to the same story.

Ok, let's try three years, reaching back to April 2009: 19 results. Now we're getting somewhere! Surely one of these... oh. More links to the Games on Demand story, plus a couple of forum posts that include "Games for Windows Live adds its own layer of complexity to backing up save games," and "I don't know if Games for Windows Live adds to your Xbox account or not."

Four years, all the way back to April 2008. 24 results. Bingo! In March 2009, Shack News reported: "Games for Windows Live Adds Anti-piracy Solution, In-game Marketplace." Hard to get excited about an anti-piracy solution, but the story has a little more meat: "Games for Windows Live will now save users' settings in the cloud, allowing access to the settings regardless of the PC used." Hey, that's great, and a mere five months after Steam announced Steamcloud! Unfortunately that feature has barely seen any significant use -- if GFWL were to sync, for example, my Batman: Arkham Asylum games instead of locking me out of them when I reformatted my PC, I might only hate it 75 percent as much as I do.

But think about that: the last time GFWL added a feature, George W. Bush was president. Obama's campaign for change obviously did not have much effect in Redmond. In that same time period, even if you exclude Steamcloud (which actually does sync some saved games), Valve has busily added screen capture and sharing tools, item trading, Facebook integration, increased voice chat quality, revamped its patching system to improve download efficiency, Steam Guard authentication, numerous UI tweaks, cross-platform play with the PlayStation 3, and perhaps the crown jewel: the Steam Workshop mod system. I'm probably forgetting some here, but the point is that there is absolutely no contest. Next to Steam GFWL is a bad joke, and shows no signs of improvement.

There Is No Future

Microsoft may refuse to pull the plug, but GFWL's incompetence and lethargy may soon become its own undoing, as more and more game makers abandon it. Over the last few years it's been dropped like a bad habit by 2K, Bethesda, Eidos/Square Enix, THQ, Rockstar, and SEGA. EA had a one-time fling when it released Bulletstorm last year, but with the launch of Origin it's safe to say that won't happen again. The latest to join the exodus is Codemasters, which has dropped GFWL from DiRT: Showdown. "I think a lot of people have shouted out for it, asking why we're not using Steamworks, so we've transitioned across now," said DiRT Associate Producer Ian Smith when asked about the switch. "It's the logical choice for us, the popular logical choice for everybody concerned." He added that this will likely be a long-term switch for Codemasters, and cited customer concerns about usability with GFWL.


That means that as of now, the only notable publishers (other than Microsoft itself) still using GFWL are Warner Bros., Capcom, and Namco Bandai, and the only announced games of note are Street Fighter X Tekken, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, Resident Evil 6, Lost Planet 3, and Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. That's still too many, but we're on the right track: if Namco Bandai gets the message and drops it as well, as it's hinted that it might, GFWL's support will have dwindled to near oblivion, and it'll only be a matter of time before Capcom and Warner give in as well.

But wait, you say! Microsoft is integrating Live into Windows 8! True, but that's not Games for Windows Live, it's Xbox Live. That's the Live Microsoft cares about, and that's the Live that will live on. Even if GFWL does continue to plug along somehow, what's a multiplayer service with no games?

Full disclosure: GameSpy is owned by IGN, which also owns and maintains the GameSpy Tech multiplayer matchmaking service.


Spy Guy says: Games for Windows Live can't die fast enough for me. For all the flak Origin gets, it's a much better experience than GFWL, and has already added new features in patches. It may not hold a candle to Steam, but at least it seems to want to. What's your experience with GFWL been like?