🚀 go-pugleaf

"Doug Jacobs" <dja...@shell.rawbw.com> wrote in message 
news:12vjr9cel71urc0@corp.supernews.com...
| In comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic Zaghadka <zagh...@hotmail.com> wrote:
|
| > Massive badmouthing coming from the people who MAKE the PC platform. 
"Games For
| > Windows" a fraud! Valve the only TRUE supporter of pc games. How 
humiliating!
|
| I always thought 'Games for Windows' was a Vista marketing scheme.
|
| Even then, I have to wonder how much Microsoft wants us to be playing
| games on the PC anyways.
|
| Let's think about this for a second.  In the console market, the hardware
| vendor - curently Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft - don't make money by
| selling hardware.  In fact, they often sell the hardware 'at cost' or even
| at a loss in order to make the prices attractive to customers.  This is
| because the hardware companies make their money from the game developers.
| First, they make money by selling them the development tools for the
| hardware.  Second, they take a licesnsing fee from the sale of each and
| every game sold for their hardware.  It's estimated this liscensing fee
| comes to about $10 for each new Xbox 360 game.
|
| Compare this to the PC world.  Sure, Microsoft makes some money selling
| their OS and maybe some tools (and Office!) to developers, not to mention
| that each gamer supposedly has to buy a copy of their OS in order to play
| these games.  However, take WoW for instance.  Microsoft makes $0 from
| WoW.  They make $0 from Supreme Commander.  $0 from everything PopCap
| sells.
|
| I honestly think Microsoft wishes the big development houses would drop
| the PC altogether and move over to the Xbox 360 - which, may I remind you,
| has its own DirectX-like API.  This makes it more attractive for former PC
| developers, I'm sure...  On top of that, the Xbox 360's online service
| provides a marketplace for smaller developers to showcase their games.
| This works for Microsoft in two ways.  First, it allows Microsoft to
| showcase the 360 as a "casual gaming" platform, and second, of course, it
| allows Microsoft to dip into that revenue stream as well.
|

You're missing the big picture...  Microsoft pushes "Games for Windows" and 
requires any companies that wish to sport that logo to comply strictly with 
their guidelines...  Guidelines which, strangely enough, lean heavily 
towards Vista and DX10 software/hardware, and just happen to make the end 
product MUCH more easily portable to (drumroll please) the XBox 360!  This 
benefits MS on 2 fronts:  First, it's well known that they want to own the 
console market, so any advantage they can give their XBox is of use to them. 
And the second benefit is that it gives yet another hard forced push to the 
arguably ho-hum Vista...  They've found wonderful ways (through marketing 
and pushing hardware manufacturers to go totally Vista) to make a "why 
bother?" upgrade into a "must have" item...  If you want to play along with 
everyone else, that is.  It's a perfect example of forcibly creating a 
market for a lackluster product.

Consider that they make a much higher revenue per sale of a copy of Vista 
than they do on an XBox unit - each XBox unit originally cost them more to 
produce than they sold it for, but I don't know if that is still the case. 
The XBox licensing fee is where they make their money, on the games 
themselves.  And isn't there a licensing fee that MS gets for using the 
"Games for Windows" name and logo?  I forget if they charge it or not...

In the end, it's a win/win scenario for MS...  or should I say a money/money 
scenario...

CoinSpin