Monday, August 18, 2008

Steam in the street

Hello, obligatory introductory post here from a frequently frustrated PC gamer. I’m a Mac user, in my line of work it is practically a necessity. Design and prepress in a print environment? You’d be a fool to use anything else. You’d also be a fool to attempt it if you are colorblind but that is a different story for a different time. Anyway, I don’t expect much in the way of native gaming (meaning at best is Blizzard, at worst is anything not Blizzard… and Bungie? They can just go to hell).

With Boot Camp, I can also be a native Windows user, where my gaming expectations drastically change.

What is so painful is to know, inside and out, the beast that is Xbox live. That is such a revolutionary step forward in gaming as a social experience. Old friends, whose early years were often spent sitting in-front of a convex CRT for some very late nights could keep that tradition alive despite the distances that inevitably separate us.

Then you look at Games for Windows. Okay, you are already in league with these publishers and developers for the Xbox versions, you know the games inside and out. Then you try to run it in Windows and everything goes to hell. You end up with little a hint of marketing on the packaging along with SecureROM and Starforce. Yes, pirating on a PC is far easier than on a 360 but with a little soldering skill and a decent external hard drive there is little difference. Both types of piracy are, for most “AAA” developers, absolutely useless for anything online, typically locked to single-player only. So where is the API for Games for Windows as there is for Xbox Live?

One can argue hardware but the Xbox dashboard is not really the greatest drain on the system and could be adapted to the endless hardware variation that exists with modern PCs. Its brilliance lies in the simplicity. If a friend comes online, no matter what you are doing, it lets you know. You can invite them to whatever game you are playing, they can do the same and there’s a standardized VOIP. That’s it, all it takes for everything to just work the way it should.

So there is Steam, which is far from perfect but has a good go at it, yet it comes across as a rather watered-down version of Xbox Live. Some chat, maybe voice chat, maybe an in-game friends list. The primary draw of Steam is that you don’t have to drive to a mall to buy a game. It is still missing that simplicity that a unified Windows Live framework could provide across any game.

Yes, I’m calling for more Microsoft consolidation and the only justification is because it worked so well on the 360.