You should thank Microsoft for Games for Windows Live. No, seriously.

You should thank Microsoft for Games for Windows Live.  No, seriously.

After playing computer games alongside console games for most of my life, sometime in the mid 2000's I went full console for awhile.  Even as an early computer gamer, to me, the keyboard (and later the keyboard-mouse combo) was not the ideal way to control many games, particularly those that involved fast action.  My Apple II and later my Commodore Amiga both used joysticks and other game controllers.  Admittedly, there are some games that benefit from the precision of mouse and keyboard controls, but for the vast majority of games out there today aside from strategy, isometric RPG and competitive multiplayer games, a modern dual-analog controller makes a lot of sense.  Computer games in the early days of Windows gaming were also horribly buggy in my experience.  These two factors led me to devote most of my gaming time to the then-new Xbox 360.  

So, you might ask what brought me back into the (now re-named) PC gaming fold?  Simple:  large-scale controller support.  Where did that trend start?  Some would point to Valve's Big Picture and more recently their Steam Machines initiative, but actually Games for Windows Live started controller support as we know it today.

Image courtesy Wikipedia and Microsoft

The hatred of Microsoft's Windows gaming venture is a little mystifying to me.  Arguments about requiring registration, being online and DRM just don't hold up as far as I'm concerned, since Steam requires much of this also. For the record, I don't get the hating of EA's Origin, either, but that's for another time.  Suffice to say there are many PC gamers that took offense to Microsoft butting into Windows gaming, not the least for trying to force Windows Vista on gamers and their initial plan (that was dropped) to charge a monthly fee for multiplayer gaming.

With that acknowledged, the recent resurgence of PC gaming, and especially the rise of things like Big Picture mode and PC gaming in the living room, can all be traced back to GFWL pushing Xinput (read: Xbox 360) controller support on developers.  Beside the fact that over the last decade or so many, if not most AAA-level games have become truly cross-platform and are available on PC as well as consoles, you can attribute this push for controller support on the PC to getting more gamers on PC and off console.  At the same time, over the past several years, Windows has become less buggy and a more stable platform for gaming.

So, while GFWL may now be defunct and a repentant Microsoft once again trying to make inroads with PC gamers with the launch of DirectX 12, we should really thank Games for Windows Live for helping make PC gaming what it is today:  A success, and a true console alternative, not just a different platform for "computer style" games only.