Games For Windows: The Service, The Magazine, and Keeping It Free
Jeff Green of Games For Windows magazine was on last week’s Gamers With Jobs Conference Call podcast and when asked about his magazine’s connections to Microsoft’s PC version of Xbox Live, he said something unusual. First, he has almost nothing to report on the still-coming-soon Games For Windows Live initiative and is having as much of a hard time getting people at Microsoft to talk as other publications are.
But wait, they asked him, isn’t your magazine the official one for Games For Windows? Yes, he agreed, but in fact everyone who was involved in the deal that turned Computer Gaming World into Game For Windows Magazine has left their jobs and moved on. Everyone, that is, except him.
It sounds like one of those corporate mergers where people make a deal and then jump ship to let other people figure out how to make things work, doesn’t it? Now he didn’t say that of course, but it was certainly interesting to hear that his magazine doesn’t really have an inside track into anything going on at Microsoft.
Elsewhere in the podcast Jeff mentioned that he hoped the first job at Microsoft has to be to turn Games For Windows Live into a free service to get the public to pay attention to it. Charging for it won’t really fly, he thinks, with an audience used to free services like XFire and Steam.
XFire, incidentally, hit an 8 million member milestone last week. I just loaded it up again the other day — I rarely remember to run it even when I do play PC games — and it patched itself with a new theme that I like quite a bit.
Do you run XFire, and do you think Games For Windows Live is a lost cause in the face of free services like it and established services like Steam or GameTap?
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Danny
