GFWL Rant

stolen from subedii care of kotaku.com

Fortunately I answered this question a long time ago, specifically with regards to DoW2, so I'm just going to re-paste my answer here.

Bear in mind, this was before Retribution released, and Steam has only improved since then whilst GFWL pretty much hasn't. I've denoted changes with "EDIT":

First, I apologise, this is going to be long. But you’re wondering why people dislike GFWL.

Here are my experiences over the course of a number of GFWL games, mostly with multiplayer Dawn of War 2:

- First off and most importantly, for a game that’s been GFWL certified, any and all updates have to go through Microsoft for certification before they can be applied to the game. This is a process that in itself takes well over a month, and the developer has to pay for every certification. Frankly, this is utterly utterly HORRENDOUS for online balance.

What this means for a game like DoW2 is that updates cannot be pushed out incrementally and regularly. Instead what happens is that you wait for months on end whilst game breaking balance issues are in the wild, only to receive massive mega-patches that try to fix everything at once and end up breaking something else.

You see similar on XBL for that matter. But this has the effect of hampering online play to a ridiculous degree as the game remains unpatched for anywhere up to six months (Gears of War 2 was particularly legendary for just how broken its multiplayer was, and remained, for about a half a year after its release).

Let me put this in comparison for you. Within one month of being released, Supreme Commander 2 (using Steamworks, and as such they can update freely and whenever they want) had already had more balance updates than Relic were able to push out in about six months.

Because of GFWL certification, Relic have to focus on extra-large, balance breaking updates so that they don’t extend the delays on patching further and have multiple paid certifications going at once. They aren’t Infinity Ward, Microsoft won’t "bend the rules" for them in order to fast-track updating.

For singleplayer games this isn’t really an issue. For multiplayer games it effectively destroys balance because developers can’t incrementally and immediately update the titles. It needs to go, or else needs some drastic changes. Imagine for a moment, if Team Fortress 2 had to not only have a month long certification process every time they wanted to roll out even a minor update or patch, and also had to pay for it.

EDIT:- Another factor tying into MS's need for control is that they completely despise the idea of user additions to multiplayer in the form of skins or avatars. Hence whilst Dawn of War 1 allowed anyone to upload their own personal army badge for their army, DoW 2 didn't because MS don't like the idea someone might upload something inappropriate (and hey, sometimes they will). The moment Retribution popped out using Steamworks? This feature was back in. Small thing, sure, but is shows the kind of problems you're dealing with.

/EDIT:

- There is still no external client. In order to see your friends and what they’re playing, or send them a message, you already need to be in-game to do it. MS released an entire separate client for GFWL marketplace but refuse to do so for the actual community features.

- For that matter, signing into GFWL automatically kicks you off of your XBL. For all of Microsoft’s talk of merging these two systems into a single cohesive whole that does for the consumer, it doesn’t like you running Netflix on your XBox whilst logging in on the PC.

- The community system is utterly lacklustre. Communicating with friends can’t happen through some kind of chat system, you have to effectively e-mail each other back and forth.

- But then the mic suppport, for whatever reason, seems to be pretty atrocious. With all my friends that have DoW, we’ve ended up having to use either Steam voice chat or vent. Going through GFWL just resulted in a staticy mess.

- Related to that, there’s no bindable push-to-talk button. Like everything else, that was ripped straight from XBL without though. PC-side, push-to-talk has been the standard pretty much since VOIP in games even existed. Relic had to patch in their OWN ptt button in DoW2, and that isn’t even bindable. It’s bound to the ~ key. Grief.

- TrueSkill matchmaking is the biggest thing that GFWL had over Steam at the time DoW 2 released (EDIT: But not even that anymore), and frankly, it does nothing if not scare away all the new players from multiplayer. Because upon signing up with a TS of zero, the system automatically dumps you into games with the highest (usually TS25-35) TS players in order to ascertain your "level". It does this for somewhere in the region of 50+ games (My own experience was more than that). So a new player has to spend that long just getting the tar beaten out of them in order to get decent matches going. How many do you think would be willing to stick with it for that long? And in a 3v3, having two TS 25′s on your team and one TS 3 is nothing if not a frustrating experience for everyone on the team, new and old players. I was fortunate enough to be able to play with friends so I learned faster and they tended to support me more.

EDIT: Since the switch to Steamworks and Relic using their own ELO based matchmaking algorithms, my multiplayer matching has been a LOT more stable. I'm actually sitting comfortably at a relatively consistent ranking with more decently matched games, whereas before I was constantly pinging up and down with the ridiculously stacked games . I have yet to repeat the experiences that I had back with GFWL, where I would literally play through a whole 7 games and EVERY ONE of them was stacked (against me in this case) and terrible.

/EDIT:

Everything else, Steam usually does better. Community system, updates, chat, voice chat, steam groups (no group system at all on GFWL), drop in games, I could go on. I was willing to cut Microsoft some slack at the start, back when Gears was launched on the PC. That was back in 2007. They’ve had a lot of time to reform the system since then, and in Steam an exceptional model to copy. Microsoft have shown no interest in doing so so far, most of their efforts to date have been pretty half-hearted and occasionally misdirected attempts at getting more people to use the system.

I could list out everything that Steam has improved on in the years since then, but in its stead a more pertinent question. What has MS done to make REAL, SIGNIFICANT improvements to GFWL since DoW2? Or even since it released?