Games for Windows LIVE, the counterpart to Xbox LIVE, has (apparently) never been much of a success, at least in comparison to its console bretheren. Recently it's been relaunched, and support will certainly continue (more than 85 titles are planned by the end of the year, and games like Dawn of War 2 will utilize the online component), but with all this comes two bits of news.

The first is that it may become another content delivery service (a la Steam, Impulse, GamersGate, GOG, etc) -- something they say is "on the road map" and is "clearly the next step". The second is Microsoft may drop cross-platform support, meaning PC gamers would no longer be able to play with Xbox gamers.

"Cross-platform, we learned when we did Shadowrun, is really hard to do," said senior marketing manager at Games for Windows Live Michael Wolf. "It's very challenging, especially in a first-person shooter, to make cross-platform work where one side isn't being completely dominated by the other. A lot of development time was spent on Shadowrun with professional Counterstrike players and professional Halo 2 players on console, battling it out and providing feedback to try to get that play balancing done right. What they discovered was that PC gamers had an advantage when it comes to long distance because of the accuracy of the mouse for headshots and sniping, whereas the console players had a little advantage in close combat because they could hit combos faster and pull things off quicker. ... So we've shared a lot of that learning with other publishers to try to support them for cross-platform, but the community hasn't really had a huge outcry for it. It's one of those features that's really cool, but we're also hearing that it's not something we have to deliver."

There's certainly a point there. Considering that, should PC and Xbox gamers stick to their own? Of course, Xbox 360 owners are able to connect a mouse and keyboard to their console with the aid of appropriate devices, though I've heard of some major qualms with this approach..nevertheless, it could work in theory, no?

Now, while Microsoft may not be supporting cross-platform play, they're interested in the idea of another studio doing so:

"We've always had this sort of vision of a game where the console gamer is in first-person shooter mode and then the PC gamer is like the general who has the overall strategy and the map... I don't know if anybody is necessarily building that, but I think somebody needs to take that opportunity and take that risk. And that's just a business decision by a publisher to take that risk to support that."