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Affilliation
Xbox LIVE on the PC: Games for Windows – LIVE
Microsoft is releasing “Games for Windows - Live“, which not only provides PC users with a similar service to Xbox Live, but also allows them to actually play with Xbox Live users. Imagine playing co-op missions from your PC with your buddy playing using his/her Xbox.
We knew this would come sooner or later. The “Games for Windows - Live” service will come in two membership levels, one free, one with subscription. Since most PC users are already used to playing their games for free, it would be interesting to see if people are willing to pay extra for Xbox game interoperability (other features in the paid service are already supported by some games).
official site | read more | digg story
Regardless, the concept of a gamer-tag is quite useful. I’m not sure who invented it first, but is an extension of the concept for national IDs and such.
I wonder if such a system would also produce issues that surrounds some efforts for national IDs (most prominently are the privacy related issues). The basic social context of such tags may be somewhat different for games since gamers use such systems to:
- advertise their skills in games they played
- find people with similar interests
- if keeping score is supported, allows for finding people with similar skill levels and proper match-making
Advertisers should be very happy with such efforts at consolidation, sounds like an advertising goldmine.
Regardless, I still think that interoperability between PCs and consoles are due. Regarding matchmaking, I wonder when they’ll start coming up with an inter-operable standard for game matchmaking purposes…
Hmmm… more on this particular topic soon…
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