Epic Iffy on Windows Live

Next Generation offers a report based on a 1UP podcast that Epic Games’ Mark Rein and Tim Sweeney are iffy on Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live cross-platform initiative. The duo believes the service, which has to be paid for, is a hindrance to PC gamers who have been playing multiplayer games for free… until now. “Taking all of these things that everybody has come to expect for free and now yanking them back and trying to sell them isn’t going to fly with the Windows platform-not with Epic and not with the big publishers,” said Sweeney.He also said that the key problem with the service is that Microsoft implements and charges for things the developers could do themselves. “As a PC developer, we’re used to having complete freedom and defining our feature set-what we can give gamers and what they can do in our game. That’s a big change, quite a huge change, for PC developers to now have features that we simply can’t do.”

But he is still open to the system: “We’ll wholeheartedly jump onto Games for Windows [Live] if it evolved into the sort of system that’s compatible with gamers’ expectations on the PC platform.”

Microsoft is bringing Games for Windows Live to Windows Vista to allow PC gamers to play against Xbox 360 users. The first game to use the service will be Shadowrun.