40 Days #26: Make Games for Windows Live more attractive to developers and free to consumers
Once online play on Xbox Live goes free, it only makes sense to maintain parity on the PC side and extend the same benefits to Games for Windows Live customers. In fact, that's what it should have been to begin with. GfWL should have launched as a completely free service from day one for a number of reasons. For one, PC gamers don't normally pay for online gaming anyway, so charging for it over Xbox Live doomed the brand right away and labeled Microsoft as a even more of a money whore in the eyes of PC gamers than before. Also, even if Microsoft eventually wanted to make money from premium add-ons, the service should have been free at least for an initial "introductory" period of, say, a year or so.
The problem with forcing PC gamers to pay for online gaming is twofold. It alienates the user base, which is just not used to being fleeced like that on the PC. Current Xbox Live subscribers get online play on the PC "free" as part of their existing subscription, but they shouldn't be paying for it on the Xbox side to begin with, so the "value" of this additional feature is dubious at best.
Developers get shafted too. In addition to whatever it costs them to implement the extra requirements needed for the GfWL logo, they know that they are developing features that only a very small percentage of PC gamers will ever use, simply because of that pesky fee requirement.
Making online play free would attract more PC-only gamers to the Live platform, which Microsoft needs in order to grow its user base and eventually tempt the PC folks to buy some consoles. It would also not immediately turn away casual gamers, who are used to free PC gaming, and could then easily hop onto the (hopefully) upcoming Arcade games that work over Xbox Live.
Developers would know that they can reach a much wider audience with integrated Xbox Live features, and hopefully more studios would jump in as partners of the program. Although last year it was announced that Epic's Unreal Engine will support GfWL, Microsoft still needs to push developer tools more. Integrate with more engines and provide more features - including cross-platform play improvements - to developers using XNA tools. Developers have to see value in the system - be it in cross-platform play, achievements, or unified presence and friend lists - so that they can justify spending the extra resources to tap into the Xbox Live network. And it's a network that could potentially offer them quite a lot, if only Microsoft would make it cheaper and easier to implement. In the meantime, you have competitors like Valve's already developer-friendly Steam platform beefing up their features and trying to become the online social standard in PC gaming.
It seems a shame that despite the (very) slow growth of the Games for Windows portfolio, GfWL titles are still very rare. Since Microsoft pretty much owns the PC gaming segment as the maker of the dominant operating system that all these games run on top of, they need to push this aspect of their Live Anywhere vision. Make it free for users to play online, make it enticing enough for developers to jump in, market the crap out of it, and then maybe we could see some growth in this segment.