Microsoft Declares It's Time To Focus On PC Gaming
It's been a few years since Microsoft paid much attention to the PC gaming industry, but someone apparently wandered past the sole employee in the PC gaming devision and kicked him a few times. With Halo Reach released and Kinect in the launch tube, MS has announced it wants to "push the business model into new directions." The problem, according to the software giant, is that it isn't seen as the industry leader or trendsetter that it wants to be.
Hi everyone, this is Steve from our Windows Gaming Division.
There’s been a fair bit of criticism aimed at Microsoft that we were spending a lot of our focus on console, and we need to be putting resources behind PC as well,” Microsoft Games Studios’ general manager Dave Luehmann told MCV in an interview. "Other companies should look to Microsoft for leadership, but I’m not sure they do. It is our job to lead the way on PC. And in some ways we are doing that and in other ways we are not. So we need to step up. "We are putting some real investment and big IPs behind the Windows platform. We’ve spoken of the first three, Fable III, Age of Empires Online and Microsoft Flight. However we are not going to stop there."
Microsoft hasn't taken a substantial interest in gaming since it launched the Games For Windows brand in 2006. Four years on, GfW Live is free to use and offers similar functionality to XBox Live, but doesn't allow PC gamers to take on their console counterparts directly. The biggest single problem with GfW, from our perspective, is that gamers have no reason to prefer it. MS could potentially build momentum around certain features that Steam doesn't offer, but for gamers, being forced to login to yet another service before playing is nothing but annoying. The best way for Microsoft to push PC gaming would be for the company to mandate quality PC ports from console titles (or vice versa), ensuring that both graphics and gameplay take advantage of a computer's superior processing power.
Hi everyone, this is Steve from our Windows Gaming Division.
There’s been a fair bit of criticism aimed at Microsoft that we were spending a lot of our focus on console, and we need to be putting resources behind PC as well,” Microsoft Games Studios’ general manager Dave Luehmann told MCV in an interview. "Other companies should look to Microsoft for leadership, but I’m not sure they do. It is our job to lead the way on PC. And in some ways we are doing that and in other ways we are not. So we need to step up. "We are putting some real investment and big IPs behind the Windows platform. We’ve spoken of the first three, Fable III, Age of Empires Online and Microsoft Flight. However we are not going to stop there."
Microsoft hasn't taken a substantial interest in gaming since it launched the Games For Windows brand in 2006. Four years on, GfW Live is free to use and offers similar functionality to XBox Live, but doesn't allow PC gamers to take on their console counterparts directly. The biggest single problem with GfW, from our perspective, is that gamers have no reason to prefer it. MS could potentially build momentum around certain features that Steam doesn't offer, but for gamers, being forced to login to yet another service before playing is nothing but annoying. The best way for Microsoft to push PC gaming would be for the company to mandate quality PC ports from console titles (or vice versa), ensuring that both graphics and gameplay take advantage of a computer's superior processing power.
