GWJ: Steam Community Is Better Than Xbox Live
While gushing over the Team Fortress 2 beta, which is part of the Orange Box coming from Valve on October 10th (it just went gold for PC and 360), the GamersWithJobs Conference Call crew stated unequivocally that Steam Community has just come from nowhere to take the crown as the best community gaming service away available from Xbox Live.
The ability to link in the ability to report to your buddies about any game you’re playing on your computer; the very quick ability to get and send messages from inside any Valve game; event pop-ups that announce that hey, it’s 5 minutes to that scheduled game of Team Fortress 2 you wanted to be part of; and integrated voice chat that’s better than Ventrilo and allows multi-person calls (unlike XBL) are all virtues of the service they extol in their 51st podcast. Quotable quotes:
Steam Community has come from nowhere and completely nailed it.
They go on to say that if Games For Windows Live doesn’t do everything Steam Community does and for free, it’s done.
Other comments from the crew center around the fact that TF2 is such a quick game that they’re not sure how well it’ll work with a console controller. They’ll talk more about it when it’s released at retail.
With no PC gaming friends who use any online matchmaking services like XFire or Steam, I almost never boot them up. My Steam friends list has James on it, and he hasn’t loaded it up in over a year, possibly since our last try at running some Half-Life 2 deathmatches. Come to think of it, since he just nuked his desktop to reinstall Windows, I wonder if he’s going to even bother to reload it at all. The GWJers did say that running servers is now very easy to do. Maybe we’ll give it a shot again sometime soon.
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