Live For Windows Coming in May

Several outlets are carrying the news that Live for Windows is coming in May to a PC near you. The announcement carried confirmation of a similar pricetag for Xbox Live, as well as details on some new titles. Halo 2 will be releasing right around the launch of the service (slated to go up May 8th), and Shadowrun will follow quickly sometime in June. Gamasutra has an interview with Xbox Live general manager JJ Richards on the subject, and 1up offers a bit of commentary with the news. Though when asked about it last week Microsoft reps seemed extremely confident, it still remains to be seen whether PC gamers will pay for what they've always gotten for free.

Xbox Live has features you don't get for free now

[Blakey Rat]

For instance, voice across the entire system (not just in-game chat) without having to worry whether the person is using TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, or Skype.

A single username across the entire system, meaning you can be sure the "HappyGodzilla" you play in Halo 3 is the same "HappyGodzilla" you got teamed up with in Shadowrun. This also greatly assists with getting rid of griefers and jerks.

I'm not necessarily saying it's worth $50, but to say that Xbox Live offers nothing is disingenuous if not outright wrong.

Re:Excuse for Vista

[keytoe]

You're being disingenuous with your objection. The GP poster was talking about backwards compatibility with respect to the OS, not with hardware. The point stands that it is still possible to this day to run software written in 1984 for Mac OS 6.x on a 68k processor. That's two processor architectures and a complete OS rewrite. I'd call that pretty good backwards compatibility. The only times an application requires a certain version of the OS is when it is actually using a feature that wasn't present in a previous release - not due to some artificially created 'requirement' by Apple.

Additionally, it's possible to run their current OS on some amazingly old or completely unsupported hardware. I'm not sure how Apple's decision to standardize on a single hardware platform relates to backwards compatibility at all, actually.

Re:Xbox Live has features you don't get for free n

[Anonymous Coward]

Xfire is free. It automatically downloads updates/patches for your games. It automatically tells you when your friends are online, what server they're on, what teamspeak server they're on. It lets you automatically join your friend's gameserver. It lets you automatically join your friend's teamspeak server. It lets you voice chat or text chat with your friends.
I'm just saying. I will not be spending $50 to get what I already get for free. BTW, some games (Battlefield2, etc) have very good voice chat built in. For those that don't, I love teamspeak (Speex codec sounds great at 12kbps)

Re:Excuse for Vista

[Kalriath]

It does need APIs only available in Vista. DirectX 10. DirectX 10 is virtually a rewrite of DirectX according to the material I've read. DirectPlay is replaced with Live, DirectSound is replaced with XACT (I think that's it), and so on. And DirectX requires the new Vista driver model, which is so insanely different from WDDM that virtually no drivers work on it at this time.