Games for Windows Live is being relaunched again.

Considering all the fun I had last time, I personally can’t wait for this. I am sure we’re all very excited to see if the Marketplace will actually allow us non-Americans to spend our money once this merger goes through.

That would be incredible. Then they’d just need to do something about their horrible client, the horrible restrictions it places on games, the horrible infrastructure it allows games to use, and all the other ways in which it currently tries so very hard to make games unbuyable, unpatchable, and unplayable. If they then also were to start taking potential security issues seriously, then we might finally have reached a point where it stops detracting value from the games it is inflicted upon.

Or, of course, this could be yet another attempt at “rebranding” the same miserable junk “service” they’ve had for years. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time they put out press release about how the service is going to improve.

So far, it hasn’t won many people over.

Today, I went to look at their site again, as they have Deus Ex on sale, and, while it is a 10 year old game, and I already have it, I was interested in seeing if they’d opened up the store for people outside America and the UK yet.

Apparently they haven’t. But they have been busy over the last two weeks. They have added a new message to the “screw you, go spend your money elsewhere” page. It now points out that I actually have the option of using their desktop client:

Do I really need to point out the ways in which this is ridiculous?

• they know which region I am in. I just logged in (even if they forcibly logged me out again immediately), so there is no need for the wooly “you can go visit our completely unrelated sibling site, xbox.com, to see if we support your region”. They could just say “yes, we support your region in the client” or “no, we don’t support your region in the client either”.
• I have to sign in with my “Xbox LIVE” client? I don’t care about your Xbox. By your own admission, this is the Games for Windows Marketplace client. And I have a Games for Windows account. I happen to know that the two accounts are the same, but not everyone is aware of this. So how about at least keeping focus on the “Windows” part long enough to tell the user that you need to log in with your Games for Windows account?
• WHY? Given that the marketplace client is already available in my region, they obviously have got all the legal/licensing/tax issues worked out. They can sell games to Danish customers. They also, apparently, have a working browser-based store. What conceivable reason could there be for not allowing Danish customers to use the browser-based store then? Why would you artificially prevent your customers from 1. using your brand new feature (even if it is one all your competitors have had since they launched), and 2. giving you money? Why would you, when you finally have a chance at catching up, just a little bit, with the competition, choose to opt out of it?
• hey, now it says United Kingdom at the top. Last I checked, it said United States. Of course, neither is meaningful, in that two seconds previously (actually, probably closer to 10 seconds, given the amazing speed with which the whole Windows Live login thing works), I logged in with a Danish account, and of course, I visited the site through a browser, which comes absolutely loaded with information about me: locale/culture preferences, IP address, OS details and whatever else. It wouldn’t be rocket science to figure out where I’m from, even if I’m not logged in.

Now, before we go check out the client, let’s speculate a bit. I’d imagine that the reason why I am not allowed to use their web-based store is because they have not yet localized the site for Danish users. We’ll touch on that again later, but for now, let’s just note that:

• that’s not a problem. We understand English perfectly well. Movies are rarely dubbed, unless a game is aimed at the 6-year-olds, it is never localized, and of course, Steam gets by perfectly well in English.
• Microsoft, and especially the GfWL team, is just horrible at translations in general.
• GfWL has a history of horrible localization practices. (I’ve mentioned a few of them here).

With that out of the way, onwards…

To the client!

So if I launch the client, I may actually be permitted to give Microsoft my money. This should be interesting. Here’s what I see once I log in:

So first, the Danish bits don’t actually roll off the tongue… “Alt indhold, der kan hentes”? This has got to be the only menu item ever to contain a comma. It’s also not very descriptive. “hentes” (be fetched/retrieved)” isn’t exactly specific. They could just say “downloaded”, given that the word has been commonly used in Danish for a decade at least. And the sentence structure is just awkward. “All content, which can be retrieved”?

Second, fully half of the page is in English anyway. The games themselves, obviously, have English descriptions (or so it would seem, until you look closer and the much more horrible truth is revealed), and even the big tagline used on the central ad for Fallout is in English.

But so is half of the GfWL-controlled content. Marketplace. Download. Settings. Feedback. (“Download” is, of course, wonderfully ironic, given the hoops they jumped through just before, to avoid using the horrible evil word “download” in the left side menu.

But let’s leave the localization issues behind for a moment. I (supposedly) came here to buy a game, after all. In fact, I came here to buy a hugely discounted game. I wonder where to find it. You’d think they would put the special offers on the front page, wouldn’t you? And yet, I see no “DEUS EX IS RIDICULOUSLY CHEAP RIGHT NOW” notices anywhere.

In fact, I don’t see any prices at all. What kind of store is this?

Well, since they seem to have forgotten about their sale, let’s play along and assume that the games on the front page are what we should be interested in. Hey, there’s Batman, Batman is cool. The game is also supposed to be pretty awesome, so let’s click on that:

Well, what do you know, the game did have a price after all (just around $45, so it’s not even a staggeringly unreasonable price). For some reason, they do not have any screenshots showing me any of the game. You’d think that could be arranged, wouldn’t you?

Not shown on this screenshot, but visible if I’d picked another game, such as Dawn of War II, is the hilariously badly-named “game features” in the lower left. Here it just says “players 1″, which, while I’d normally have separated with a colon or something, is perfectly readable.

If there were other features they felt the need to advertise, however, they’d really be getting creative.

In the case of Dawn of War II, they have:

• “Flere spillere online 2–6″ (translation: “Multiple players online 2–6″) — what does that even mean? Are there multiple DoWII players online between 2 and 6? Is that AM or PM?
• “Samarbejde 1–2″ (translation: “Cooperation 1–2″) — whuh?
• “Stemme” (translation: “vote” or “voice”)

now, being the cynical and experienced gamer that I am, I can guess what they meant: the multiplayer modes support between two and six players, there is a coop mode for 1–2 players (how do you play cooperatively if you’re only one player, though?), and the game supports voice chat.

But really, this text is not what I’d consider readable.

Never mind, there’s a much bigger WTF-moment waiting for us. See if you can spot it. I’ll wait.

Need a hint? Try reading the game’s description. All of it, please.

Yes, that’s right. They mix three different languages, in the same text field, and without even a line break separating them.

We start out in English with a plain game description. Then it is mentioned, in Danish, that there are no refunds on the game. And then there’s some German going on about DRM.

Beautiful, isn’t it? Starting to see why I’d rather they just let me use the English web-based store? I don’t want to be locked out while I wait for another language-mutilating translation. Just let me use English today, and English tomorrow, after you’ve launched your (optional, hopefully) Danish translation.

Ah well, as it happens, I actually bought this game on GamersGate the other day, when it was on sale at 25% of the price charged here. So let’s see what else they’ve got:

Hmm, still no prices. No way to filter games, for example by release year or by genre. No way to search either. That’s not very useful. Nevertheless, at least we can order by title, which allows us to find what we came for, Deus Ex. Hey, 7 DKK? That is actually pretty cheap.

So, at this point, I apparently go momentarily insane. I did something I’d sworn never to do.

I bought a game

Yes, I already own the game (probably even twice. I believe I have a boxed copy somewhere, and a copy on Steam), and yes, I’ve already played it (more than twice). But it was cheap, and I was curious to see how the actual purchasing process worked.

And to be fair, it was, on the whole, relatively smooth. It did ask me to sign in to xbox.com once more when adding my credit card details, and on the checkout screen there were a few oddities:

The image of the game seems to have been mislaid, which might have been acceptable in a web browser, where an individual HTTP request may easily fail, but in a desktop application (and significantly, one which showed this very image just seconds ago) it just seems sloppy.

And there is another mention of Xbox LIVE for some strange reason, but again, nothing out of the ordinary.

It wasn’t until I received my email receipt that I got another surprise:

Count how many times it says XBox. I have no clue, I lost count.

Now count how many times it says Windows: that’s right, it didn’t.

The instructions on how to install/play the game describe the procedure for an XBox. Are they seriously suggesting I try to play a 10-year-old PC game through the XBox Dashboard?

Why are they thanking me for my purchase from “Games on Demand on XBox Live”? I haven’t purchased anything from there. I don’t even have an XBox.

Of course, it is also interesting to see that the links at the bottom are not actually links. I have to copy/paste (good thing I’m not on a Windows Phone 7 then, eh? ;)) them into a browser if I want to visit them.

Well, to be fair, the service has improved in the last two weeks. It has gone from a very user-hostile experience which culminated in “we won’t sell you any games” message, to the same user-hostile experience which, this time, ends with a marginally better “we might sell you some games, but you’ll have to check whether or not this is the case, and if it is, you have to use another user-hostile interface… Oh, and did we mention you have to install it on your PC too?”

And in the process of offering this improvement, they unfortunately have to remind the user of all the old flaws in the service, all the ones that the web-based store was supposed to get away from. Instead of fixing their awful website, they remind us that it is backed by an awful, but functional, desktop application. That’s something… I guess.

So yes, I do believe someone on the GfWL team is trying to improve the service. I feel sorry for the guy. It can’t be easy, being the only person on your team, much less in a corporation the size of Microsoft, who actually genuinely wants to improve the GfWL service.

Sadly, at this rate, it probably won’t happen in my lifetime.

Unlike the last time it “relaunched”, however, this time it actually has a new feature as well: it is now possible to view (and use) their store from a browser, or so they claim. And what’s more, games can now, apparently, be bought using money, actual human currency, rather than imaginary Microsoft Points.

In practice? Not so much.

I’ve mentioned before that the GfWL service is little more than an insult towards PC gamers and that Microsoft seemingly just doesn’t care. Once again, I’m left wondering whether the GfWL team is really as incompetent as it appears, or if has somehow been tasked with instilling as much hatred and loathing as possible in the average PC gamer, in an attempt to get everyone to move over to the much more profitable XBox.

So I never had high hopes when they announced yet another relaunch, this time with a web-based storefront. I assumed it would be as half-baked and sloppy as the rest of GfWL has always been. Turns out I overestimated them. It is worse.

The following chronicles my attempt to check out their new web marketplace:

Visit the website

I head over to http://www.gamesforwindows.com/ and attempt to log in. I am asked to sign in with a Windows Live ID. Now this, in itself, might be considered acceptable. Windows Live ID is widely used, but it makes me wonder: given that every one of their potential customers are known to already have accounts at one or more competing services, wouldn’t it perhaps be a smart move to try to support something common? Something that, unlike Steam, GoG or GamersGate, doesn’t require the user to create yet another account? Something that might at least give the illusion of accomodating the user, rather than trying to get the user (who really doesn’t care about GfWL, as he already has 50+ games on Steam, and another dozen on GoG and perhaps a few on other services) to jump through hoops for the sake of GfWL? In short, why don’t they allow me to sign in with my OpenID, or Facebook Connect? I am aware that many people do not use (or are not aware that they have) an OpenID, but nevertheless, it could have been a unique selling point of GfWL: “unlike our competitors, we do not require you to create yet another unique account whose password you can never remember. You’re allowed to reuse your industry standard OpenID, your Windows Live ID or your Facebook Connect.” That would have been a point in their favor. That would have given them a unique advantage, something the service severely needs.

Nevertheless, I give in, and sign in with my Live ID, the same one I used previously when I was forced to use GfWL. I am now faced with this:

Kindly explain to me why I have to visit xbox.com in order to accept the terms of service? I thought I was signing in to the PC Games for Windows Live service. They really are trying their hardest to impress on us that “you really actually want to play your games on XBox instead, right? Forget about this silly PC business, just like we’ve done”.

They don’t even redirect me to the site, they just give me a link, telling me to manually visit another, from the customers point of view, entirely unrelated, domain.

Visit XBox.com

But never mind, this was hardly unexpected, and I’m curious to see this through. I head over to the XBox.com website, where I have to sign in again.

I can’t recall seeing another site that was so clumsy as to require the user to sign in again when, after signing in the first time, he or she is required to accept the Terms of Use. But this is Microsoft we’re talking about. And not even that, it is Microsoft’s GfWL. It’s par for the course. So I log in again. I am now faced with their new terms of service. It does leave me wondering about several things, such as

• the clause that they may revoke my access to the service if my gamertag is something that other users may find offensive. So not only can I lose access to the games I paid for based on what other users think, but they’re not even required to find my gamertag offensive — it is enough that there is a possibility that someone may find it offensive. Given Microsoft’s history of blocking users for the heinous crimes of living in Fort Gay, or even worse, having the last name Gaywood, I can’t help wondering what imagined offense will prevent me from accessing the games I paid for on their service.
• the disclaimer that “available content on The Service may occasionally be made unavailable” (translated from the Danish ToS I was faced with), which doesn’t really make it clear if we are talking about temporary unavailability (which is of course acceptable. It’s not like Steam has ever managed to stay afloat when a big game was launched either), or if they mean that they may occasionally remove content permanently — which would, well, suck, if it was content I paid for.
• and that content bought in a supported country may not be available in other countries, and I may therefore be unable to redownload bought content. This one just has me baffled. Surely my GfWL account has an associated nationality (and we’ll get back to that). As long as I am registered as a Danish user of GfWL, why should I not be allowed to redownload my games when I am on vacation in, say, Tanzania? Steam lets me download the games I have on my account, wherever I am. They do of course restrict access to purchasing games if I am in a country where the game is unavailable, but once I have paid for a game, Steam lets me download it and play it.

I briefly wonder if I can get these issues clarified by contacting support, and after clicking on the big Support button, I see this:

Soo, support regarding GfWL, or the Terms of Service you want me to accept is not an option, I take it? Very well…

Because of these concerns, I am now pretty certain that I won’t actually buy anything from the GfWL marketplace, but I still want to check it out. So I accept the ToS, and am, of course, taken to the main XBox.com page. (A sane service would of course have automatically redirected me to the ToS from the GfWL page, and then returned me to the GfWL site after I had accepted the terms. But hey, these are minor nitpicks.) I close the browser tab, go back to the GfWL site, and.… am asked to log in.

Wait, what?

I was just on this site. And even if that login expired, I just came from another of your domains, where I was updating this very account and accepting the terms of use for it. And now you expect me to log in again? What happened to giving the user a pleasant experience? Just joking. I already know how much you don’t care about that.

So as the good and patient would-be customer that I am, I sign in again, for the third time so far. But surely, the ordeal is now over.

Or is it?

Unavailable

Now, there are a couple of puzzling things about this. First, of course, is the question of *what are you talking about? Denmark has had GfWL for years. I was able (but unwilling) to buy games from your old client-based store, so why can’t I do it here?

The second is a follow-on, going “why is this still limited to select countries at all? Steam lets me access their store regardless of where I’m from. They just don’t allow me to buy individual games that aren’t available in my region.

The third is “wait, why does it say “United States” up there next to my username? I don’t recall lying about my nationality when I created my GfWL account. So either I never specified a nationality, or I entered “Danish. If I never entered a nationality, I would assume the website would ask me to fill in that information now. And as said above, if I claimed to be from Denmark, I would expect to be able to see the store.

Fourth: wait, so if you think I am from the USA, then are you seriously suggesting that your store is not available there? This is absurd.

And fifth: why does it refer to an “Xbox LIVE” account region? Why would I care about Xbox Live? This is the Games or Windows Live website, isn’t it? And I just signed in with my Games for Windows account. Could we perhaps stick to the matter at hand, and consider the availability of Games for Windows Live in my Games for Windows Live account region?

Supported Countries

Let’s get this sorted out. First try: click on the “United States” link up next to my profile info. Presumably, if I can change this to say “Denmark”, then GfWL will recognize me as a Danish user and present me with the marketplace that, I presume, is available in Denmark.

Or not… Now, there are two ways to interpret this, and neither of them are what I need. Either this means that these are the only countries that are allowed to visit the GfWL store (which would exclude me), or it is merely allowing me to choose which language I’d like to see the site displayed in, which has nothing to do with whether or not the store is available to me at all.

I investigate a bit, and under Support, I see this:

and this:

So it seems pretty clear that the canonical list of supported countries is, where else, on xbox.com. Off we go again, and find this:

At this point, I’m starting to get mildly annoyed. It seems very much like both Denmark and the United States of America are supported countries, in which the marketplace should be available. I am still not sure what nationality GfWL thinks I have, but I assume it must be one of those two. And yet I am not allowed to visit the store.¹

Even visiting XBox.com, and editing my profile from there yields no hint at how to specify a nationality. I can fill out a free-text “Location” field, which obviously does nothing for GfWL, but merely tells other users where I am from (or rather, where I would like them to belive that I am from)

Smooth. Real smooth…

So, let’s try one last thing: maybe if I log in again (in addition to the first three logins I described previously, I have regularly logged out and then back in, hoping for this to solve the problem. But now I do it again, as a last ditch effort before I throw in the towel)… Please, GfWL, just work this one time, will you? Let’s see…

ok, don’t work then. That’s cool too. But really, did you need to display not just an error message, but a broken error message, on a broken page? How very Microsoft. (Of course, if this had been MSDN, I’d instead have gotten a “This content has been moved”, and a link to another page which, when I click on it, would give me a 404 error.)

Some websites (the ones that actually attempt to run a successful business) would

• redirect the user to an actual error page when an error occurs, instead of rendering half of the “please select a country” page, and then, instead of displaying the countries I can choose from, display an error message, and
• display an actual error message, not just the internal name of the error, and of course
• not ever show the text “need message”. Either they would provide a message, or they would ensure that the message is never required. What’s next? “todo” labels on the main page? Frankly, this is just embarrassing.

Well, at this point, I gave up. Games for Windows Live is a joke. I’m not sure at whose expense. It certainly makes a mockery of the GfWL team and of Microsoft’s so-called commitment to PC gaming. Sadly, it also seems to be a big arrogant practical joke directed at their users. “Haha, we got them to give our so-called service another try”. It is obviously not intended for PC gamers to use or benefit from. It is clear that even the team behind it does not care about it, and does not take it seriously. It is clear that no one further up in the ranks are interested either.

Bonus

But just to rub it in, here’s a bonus screenshot: after I’d given up, I remembered that during one of my visits to XBox.com, I was asked if I wanted to fill out a survey, that I accepted this request, and that I still had a browser window open with the survey.

Here’s the first question it asked:

I guess visiting the website because XBox Live’s sister site told me to is such a completely unexpected reason, especially on the launch day of said site’s new store, that the survey couldn’t possibly have taken it into account. Somehow, this just sums it all up wonderfully.

If anyone involved with GfWL is actually, genuinely trying to create a viable service, and if you feel I have grossly misrepresented you and your team, or if you just want to understand why I, and every other PC gamer on the planet (not least the entire staff of the world’s biggest gaming site dedicated entirely to PC games) loathe the service so much and how it can be improved, feel free to drop me a line (my contact information is displayed here, or contact me on Twitter. I promise I won’t bite.

Edit 16/11: added link to my previous rant on GfWL.

But then again, neither is the “service” known as Games for Windows Live we PC gamers are being forced to swallow. So far, you guys have done an amazing job of harassing your customers and hurting PC gaming. You’ve done more than I’d thought possible to make it as painful as humanly possible. The mere presence of your logo is enough to make every PC gamer I know want to go have a lie down.

GFWL isn’t just the infamous polished turd. Partly because it is in no way polished, but mainly because it is not just a turd, which is a passive object that, while smelly, can be easily walked around and simply avoided, but a turd-being-thrown-in-your-face, an entity which actively tries to ruin your day. Most bad PC software can simply be avoided — we just choose not to use it — no such luck with GfWL. We don’t have a choice in the matter.

Here is a short, and incomplete, list of what you need to fix to even reach neutral ground. Fixing these atrocities is enough to nearly make your service tolerable. To actually make it an asset, something that enhances the value of the PC platform, you have to reach far far beyond this. But just making it less nauseating to use would be a wonderful start, and should mean that you’ll have your hands full for the entire year.

But enough ranting. On with the list:

• Fix the friend list. When I want to invite a friend to a game, the correct approach is: 1) Hit a key to pull up the friends list. 2) Click on my friend. 3) click “invite to game”. You may have noted that this is what Steam does, and has done for years. Inviting a friend to a game takes perhaps one second there. Now, since it’s pretty obvious none of you have ever attempted to do this in GFWL, I should probably explain how it works (or fails to work) there: First, you hit a key which conflicts with every game that has a chat box: home, the key which is normally used to move the caret to the beginning of the line/text input. Then you wait for the screen to go dim and the slow and painful animation of the GWFL client unfolding. You now get to some kind of “main menu”, from which you can do absolutely nothing. Here, you click on the “Friends” button, and again, wait for the animation to finish. Now you get your friends list, from which you may.….. click on a friend, and wait for yet another animation to finish. You may then click “Invite”, and you get, once the next animation has finished, a goddamn email interface! Then you click send, and the request is sent off, in a semi-random language (see one of the following points). Or, of course, you may sometimes go directly to the email interface, from where you can either 1) fill out your friends name from memory, or 2) click the “to” field to bring up (slowly, after another animation), a list of every goddamned person you’ve ever played a game with. In short: When I want to invite a friend to a game, I do not want to send an email. I don’t want to see the list of several hundred jerks whom I was matched against in earlier games. I want to see a list of my friends, the ones I have personally indicated an interest in play with by adding them to my friends list, click on the right one, and click “invite”.
• Fix the language setting. I don’t want to get game invites in Norwegian just because someone from Norway is hosting the game (as pointed out above, I don’t need an actual message from them at all! Just give me a choice of clicking “accept/decline invitation, not an actual email message). I also want to be able to set the language myself. Yes, I use Danish regional settings, but that’s because I want the time and date formatted that way, not because I want to read your dodgy Danish translations in the GFWL interface. And despite those regional settings, I’m running an English copy of Windows, for precisely this reason: My english is good enough that I prefer your products in their original language, sidestepping all the inevitable translation issues. Said Norwegian friend literally didn’t understand what GFWL was trying to tell him when he first logged in. The so-called translation was unintelligible. Of course, another Norwegian friend, and god knows why, as they’ve compared all regional settings they could find and couldn’t find any meaningful difference, got GFWL in english. Why? I’ve gotten Danish on a few occasions, but luckily, so far, it has mostly been in English. But even so, I want 1) to be in control of the language to use, and 2) proper translations if you’re going to translate. And 3) as long as you don’t allow me to choose the language, I at least want it documented how GFWL determines which language to use. Then I can change that particular setting in Windows, and get the language I actually wanted to begin with.
• Make the GFW logo (the non-Live one, to begin with) synonymous with actual quality. Gears of War, one of your flagship titles was so badly ported it’s scary. Not only did the installer take the better part of two hours to complete, it was also buggy and required a patch to even launch the game. Which then didn’t work on 3 out of the 4 computers I’ve tried it on. This may surprise you, but to enforce a minimum quality across PC games, it is not enough to design a new logo, you also have to verify that the games that get the logo actually do behave sanely and actually work on a PC. You have to ensure not just that the game works with a 360 controller, but that the game works better than those without the logo.
• The services you provide to games tied to your service should be better than what they’d have made themselves otherwise. Dawn of War 2’s matchmaking is an atrocity. It matches new players against the most hardcore, it frequently takes minutes to find a match even in Last Stand games where there’s only one team and it was full to begin with, so the total number of players it has to find is a big fat zero. And NAT errors are frighteningly common. More so than Relic’s previous game, Company of Heroes. Or Dawn of War before it. Relic’s own homebrewed matchmaking and NAT-traversal code worked better than that being made available by you for the betterment of PC gaming.
• Make it possible to navigate and use your Marketplace.
• On the subject of the Marketplace and language settings, perhaps it might look less amateurish if you could settle on just one language on the info page for your games. The textual description for most of the games currently alternates between three languages in my client: first I get a sentence or two in Danish; then one in German, and finally we round off in English. And this is all in the same textbox. They’re not even separate paragraps, there’s no line break between them or anything. It is ridiculous, and very, very amateurish.
• Listen to community feedback. When high-profile games journalists have nothing positive to say about your service, you have a problem. When “ordinary” gamers feel just as bad about it, you have a big problem. Perhaps a good start would be to provide somewhere for users to leave feedback. Put it on Microsoft Connect. Or perhaps open a blog for GFWL specifically (rather than extending whatever XBL-related blogs you already have to also cover GFWL). Perhaps just add a “Contact” or “Feedback” link on the GFWL website, even. I’ve spent far more time than is reasonable looking for a place to provide feedback, and failed to find anything.
• Listen to developer feedback. Even if you manage to convince games journalists and actual gamers of the benefits of your service, you need to get developers on board as well.
• Make the service for PC users. Showing us images of the 360 controller is just a bad joke. Yes, we may have bought one of those, and it may even be connected to our PC, but the default mode of control is mouse and keyboard. Deal with it. Telling us to press the A button is not helpful. Showing an icon of the 360 controller in the main GFWL bar only serves to make it look like you ported the service straight from the XBox, without changing a line of code.
• And finally, your service has to provide us with some kind of value. What exactly do I gain from one of my games being GFWL-enabled that I wouldn’t have gotten if it was 1) Steam-enabled instead, or 2) old-fashioned not-tied-to-any-thirdparty-online-service?

So dear Games For Windows Live team… Is 2010 going to be the year when you finally cancel out the pain caused by your service? I’m not asking for miracles, I don’t want you to makeanything that adds positive value — I just want you to stop subtracting value from the product that uses your service. Please? Is it at least going to be the year when you start soliciting feedback? Open a blog? Open a connection on MS Connect? Provide a feedback email address? A Twitter account? Anything that might show that you’re not just a bunch of monkeys banging blindly on keyboards.

Well, like I said, harsh, but sometimes, the truth hurts. And it is nothing compared to how much your product currently hurts PC gamers.

So please, tell me that when 2011 rolls around, I’ll be able to write a more upbeat post about my hopes for you in the following year.