engadget.com/2010/10/22/micr … our-brows/
It sounds decent from the little information in the article, although I’d be more interested if they were offering a way to buy the same game on Xbox 360 and PC with a single purchase (as with SteamPlay). Still, it’s good that there will now be a way to legally acquire titles such as Fable: The Lost Chapters and Halo via digital distribution.
They need to relaunch the actual software as well, it’s a mess.
kotaku.com/5672254/microsoft-we- … n-pc-games
[quote]One obvious place where Microsoft’s new Games For Windows store may have the upper hand on Steam is how it handles digital rights management.
Where Steam uses a single proprietary system, Games for Windows will have a much more flexible approach.
The Marketplace will work with nearly all forms of digital rights management, Microsoft told Kotaku. Instead it will allow publishers to submit a pre-protected or unprotected build of their game with their choice of DRM. Microsoft will then distribute the builds on the Marketplace along with the appropriate activation keys.[/quote]
This is a strange comment, as Steam games currently do use different forms of DRM (e.g. Assassins Creed 2). But either way, having multiple forms of DRM is far from a good thing from the customer’s perspective; it complicates the experience rather than the simplifies it (something that the default Steam DRM excels at).
Well, you can’t expect Microsoft’s PC gaming guys to know what they’re talking about at this point. This same “PC vanguard” head honcho said he doesn’t even know what titles MS is developing for PC or what their plans are…
[quote]Industry Gamers: Are there any further PC games coming from Microsoft to support the market? There’s been a great deal of promise of more love for the PC gaming sector, but PC gamers feel a bit unloved.
Peter Orullian: I appreciate that. I certainly don’t have visibility in the portfolio for the PC. What their plans are I don’t know.[/quote]
Ah well, PC gamers don’t really need them. Plenty of non-Microsoft PC games on other digital distribution services. If Microsoft do start releasing more PC games that’s a bonus.