Games For Windows Live might be a relic of the past these days, but it’s going to go down in PC gaming history as one of the least popular ‘services’ ever offered by Microsoft. It was laggy, it suffered from constant technical issues, and it was pretty much despised by everyone who was forced to use it.
At least the company admits the concept was a bit of a mess. Speaking to PC Gamer, senior PC director for Xbox Kevin Unangst gave a pretty frank appraisal of GFWL’s troubled history.
”Games for Windows was a prior approach where it was more, at that time, like ‘how do we take things?’” he said, We knew we wanted to help make great multiplayer, we knew we wanted to bring things over… but it wasn’t the right approach. It was the approach of ‘let’s just take those things and transplant them’.”
Unangst says that the new Windows Store, which debuted with Windows 10 this month, will not have the same problems, and won’t attempt to directly rival Valve’s Steam as a retail platform.
”We are not intending to compete with Steam,” he explained, ”If anything, we want Steam to be even more successful. They’ve done great things for PC gamers in terms of having a single store. Over time do we want more developers to come over to our store and offer it in addition to Steam? Absolutely. Is competition good for people? Absolutely. But our goal right now isn’t to do anything else other than support Steam and help it run great on Windows 10.”
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