Games for Windows

Is it a cheap publicity stunt?

Published on August 16, 2007 By warreni In PC Gaming

Okay, so it could just be me, but I remember 'round about the time MS was getting ready to launch Vista, a flurry of press releases and interviews in popular trade publications like PC Gamer and, naturally, Games for Windows touted this new initiative that Microsoft planned to seriously hawk the PC as a gaming platform. There would be huge in-store displays at your favorite game retailer with demo kiosks, banners, and other niceties comparable to the floor space given to consoles. Vista has been out for about eight months now, and, if anything, the space dedicated to PC games in my local EBgames and Gamestop stores has actually decreased. A lot. In most of them, PC software has been shunted to one or two tiny shelving units in the rear of the store. I suppose by 2008, we PC gamers will have to go through a little doorway in a dimly-lit corner of the store, like the pornography browsers at the local newsstand. Personally, I'm pretty disappointed and mildly surprised by this shoddy treatment of PC gamers by Microsoft (although I'm not remotely surprised by EBgames and Gamestop giving us the shaft).

Comments

kryo

on Aug 16, 2007

the space dedicated to PC games in my local EBgames and Gamestop stores has actually decreased. A lot.

Indeed, but that's been slowly happening for quite some time. GFW hasn't caused that so much as it's simply failed thus far to stop it from getting worse.

I recall that Live was supposed to be an important part of GFW as well, but it's been a dud too (limited to First-party 360 ports so far and the free version is not any better--if even on par--compared to what many publishers already do for free).

Of course, one must also keep in mind that the slow adoption of Vista has probably played no small part in the matters as well.

warreni

on Aug 16, 2007

kryo said:

Indeed, but that's been slowly happening for quite some time. GFW hasn't caused that so much as it's simply failed thus far to stop it from getting worse.

I recall that Live was supposed to be an important part of GFW as well, but it's been a dud too (limited to First-party 360 ports so far and the free version is not any better--if even on par--compared to what many publishers already do for free).

Of course, one must also keep in mind that the slow adoption of Vista has probably played no small part in the matters as well.
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Well, I wasn't suggesting that the Games for Windows "initiative" was the cause of the decline of PC game retail space, but it was supposed to stop or reverse the trend, because MS was going to throw steam-shovel-loads of money at retailers to expand their PC space.

In any event, I have a hard time lending credence to the idea that the slow adoption of Vista, which many reviewers have seen as an extreme makeover of XP, has been a cause of Microsoft's apparent failure to live up to its own hype. The two shouldn't really have any direct connection; either Microsoft is serious about promoting PCs as gaming platforms, irrespective of whether said machines are running XP or Vista, or they're just using this as an excuse to tout Vista's "game-friendly" features like the Games Explorer. If the latter is true, then, as I suspected, the hype was little more than a publicity stunt in support of Vista. In my opinion, that's a pretty crummy thing for MS to do to dedicated PC gamers.

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