Microsoft Confirms Plans to Challenge Steam with Digital Distribution of Full PC Titles
"Clearly it's on our road map," said Early when asked about the digital distribution of full titles.
Entering the realm of PC digital distribution will put Microsoft into direct competition with Steam developer Valve.
Microsoft today released a new Games for Windows Live update, which improves the interface. A separate update will arrive in two to three weeks, adding support for video, demos, and DLC downloads through a Marketplace application.
Steam currently features no priced DLC, a fact which Microsoft hopes to exploit with both publishers and customers by rolling out DLC support ahead of full distribution. For instance, though Games for Windows Live exclusivity does not preclude the titles such as Fallout 3 from being sold on Steam, Fallout 3's DLC will only be available on Microsoft's GFW Live Marketplace.
A portion of the interview follows. Check back tomorrow for the full article, including details on Microsoft's plans for game support in Windows 7.
Chris Early: When we get to the place where we do distribute games digitally, will we have a digital rights management system? Maybe. Or maybe we'll just continue to support the industry leaders in that. Because it is a hard thing to do. You talk to any of those companies, and that is their whole company, is doing digital rights management.
Shack: You were saying, "When we get to the place where we sell games eventually"?
Chris Early: Did I say that? [huge laughter]
Shack: Because I ask you guys every time we do one of these interviews..
Chris Early: Clearly it's on our road map.
Shack: It's on your road map. So that's what you're looking at as a next step?
Chris Early: Right.
Shack: So this is your DLC effort, and rolling out the infrastructure, and then that will come next.
Chris Early: Right. And if I were to make that choice again today, would I go the same way? I absolutely would. Because this is something that you can't do today on a PC, right? You can buy digitally through a bunch of places.
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Begawkiness
replyCompetition is good, but they do have a lot of catching up to do. Steam is really great right now, especially with the addition of Cloud.
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zune...
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It's a solid second to the iPod, quite a feat amongst the others and it's share will grow more than drop.
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Exactly. The new Zunes are doing very well and MS has only been in the market for a short time.
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Except that other products available to the customer stank. RealNetworks complained up and down that MS was killing them, and overlooked the fact that their own software was bloated, slow, unstable, and was actually classified as adware at various points. Yet companies like Mozilla could come along, create a better product that MS made, and, wow, it actually competes. And MS wasn't forced to remove IE from the OS like they were with Windows Media Player.
This notion that Microsoft must cater to other company's shortcomings really irks me. They're certainly not perfect. But if we don't like their product, who are we to force them to change how they do business, when we can simply use our own alternative OS/Applications rather than running roughshod over their right to compete and develop freely.
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What good would competition do here though? We don't pay any kind of premium to use Steam, so it's not like they need to compete for our dollars.
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Competition could improve both services. Don't get me wrong, I was not happy to see this article and would rather just stick with Steam, but realistically it could be a good thing.
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Such as?
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competition tends to help the consumer by forcing retailers to lower prices. You asked what good competition would do. That guy up above said steam prices are twice those of retail prices.
Lets assume that the people setting the price of COD4 on Steam aren't retarded, instead they just don't think they need to lower the price to improve sales. Now we have to figure out why that is. Could it be because they don't feel the same competitive forces as retail stores?-
But would both online retailers carry the same game? It's up the same people who set the prices.
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And if no one buys, they will lower prices.
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Steam is great and all on the actual distribution front but it varies wildly as an application. It can be fine at times, then slow and unresponsive in others. Almost daily now, I lose connection to the Friends network with interruptions of 15-20 minutes at a time. I have no doubts about MS's ability to code a tight, stable app based on their experiences with Live Messenger.
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that might be more of an idication of your internet/network connection or something on your PC. I rarely have an issue with Steam, and I use it flawlessly on both of my computers.
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This does seem like a personal issue. It must depend on your ISP as I only get friends dropouts 2 or 3 times a week.
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I also do get disconnected from my friends alot. I think the best feature would be if you could message MSN friends from ingame like steam does with an overlay and steam friends, having teh ability to do that with all of my MSN friends would be an instant convert (i would also use steam, but noone is saying I can't use both.)
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It checks to see if your .gcf files are fragmented. It offers to fix them to improve performance. Is this a bad thing? It has never started the process without my confirmation, so I don't really see the problem here.
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My HDD doesn't seem to "churn" while using Steam.... when does it do it for you?
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