Most of the support that it has been afforded by third party publishers thus far has been motivated by kickbacks from Microsoft. It’s simply another piggy bank for publishers to raid along with NVIDIA’s “the way it’s meant to be played” program and similar schemes from AMD, Alienware, etc.

At least, that’s how it was seen until the cracks started to show. (Fallout 3, anyone?) As Mr. Wardell points out, the system is a burden and an obstacle unless you’re trying to make a completely airtight, unchanging console-style game, which is a business model that hasn’t been viable on the PC for at least two years now.

(I was most amused by the way that Batman: Arkham Asylum lets you cut GFWL’s stubby fat fingers off the first time you boot it up. You just *know* that MS had originally intended them to disable saving the SINGLE PLAYER game unless you signed up to Live.)

On the Xbox 360 developers contractually have no choice but to use Live. On the PC, there’s no demand for it and many better alternatives. It needs to be euthanised before it stinks up any more games.

You’re right to remark on the decision by MGS to completely retreat from the PC market. A huge, huge mistake. Every other major publisher is able to see the value in nurturing evolving markets instead of follow doomed strategies for the sake of saving face. Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda, EA and Ubisoft probably can’t believe their luck, watching whole studios and decades-old multi-million-selling franchises being wiped because MS entertainment division management genuinely believes that the 360 business will keep growing forever. Awesome guys, maybe by 2027 you’ll have sold as many units as the PS2, PSP or Wii – who knows, before the heat death of the universe you might even get an MMO on the machine!

Windows 7 is probably going to be embraced by gamers and publishers, while GFW will continue to be shunned. Hopefully this will be a wake-up call for MS to do something about the rampant management hubris that is resulting in such wasteful spectacles as Ensemble and FASA shutting down, Rare working on Mii-too avatars and Lionhead squandering their talents on confused attempts to mimic console RPGs, instead of the PC strategy games they were born to make.

Boycotting AMD is just going to hurt PC Gamers even more. As if the consoles won’t goto Intel anyway if AMD goes under. All that is going to do is create more market problems for PC Gamers. A lack of competition will drive prices way up all over again. And consoles will become even more viable for the gamer-on-a-budget.

It blows my mind that people are even still buying the bloody Xbox 360 after all the issues it has had since release. PCs are always a generation or two ahead in technology and capability. They allow for far more interactivity and richness of content. And don’t ship with a red ring of death.

Are my fellow gamers really that dumb? To hell with consoles.

I mean we have to put up with microsoft,drm, big publisher garbage then they are going to have to pay the price. It called bigger or higher puduction costs. AMD goes bankuprt them console production costs get bigger.

the whole pc Industry will feel our boycott.