Microsoft Reveals Big Plan for Cross-Platform Gaming

In May of 2006, Bill Gates announced that Xbox 360 gamers would be able to seamlessly connect, play and communicate with their friends on PC, heralding a new era of cross-platform gaming. The upshot was Games for Windows Live, a service that was so maligned that Microsoft eventually shut it down.

Now, more than 8 years later, they’re taking another swing at it.

At this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s Head of Xbox, fleshed out plans first revealed during the Windows 10 event back in January.

"Our goal in gaming at Microsoft is to allow people to play games wherever they are," Spencer explained. Put simply, Microsoft wants to make it easy for developers to put the same game on Xbox One, PC, tablet and phones. In the current plan, you’d buy a game once and immediately have it for any other platforms it supports.

Take, for example, Gigantic, a newly-revealed game. The game blends shooter gameplay with the strategy of an online game like League of Legends. When it launches later this year, you could start playing Gigantic on your Xbox One, go on vacation, and continue your progress right where you left off using your Windows 10 laptop. Anything you buy in the game carries over, along with your friends list. You’ll even be able to play against PC gamers if you’re on a console and vice versa.

All of this, admittedly, sounds very similar to the functionality of Games for Windows Live back in the mid-2000s, but there is a key difference. Because Windows 10 is being built with this functionality in mind, there’s less of a need to jury-rig the system to make it all work.

The other major issue that felled Games for Windows Live, a lack of software, seems like a key focus for Microsoft. Spencer revealed more than a dozen games that are being built for Windows 10 and Xbox One simultaneously. In a promotional video, indie developers espoused the ease of getting an Xbox One game to run in Windows 10, saying it took less than a day to get it up and running on the new platform.

Cross-platform software is really only the start for Microsoft, which intends to make all of its wireless Xbox One peripherals (controllers, headsets and the like) compatible with Windows 10 through the 2015 release of a wireless dongle.

At the heart of all of this is the Xbox App, which is being natively built into every Windows 10 device. The app acts as a hub for everything gaming on Windows 10, letting you launch games, track Achievements and see what your Xbox Live friends are up to. Future updates will allow game streaming through the Xbox app, letting you play Xbox One games on a nearby tablet over WiFi.

Microsoft does seem much more serious about cross-platform play this time around, but there are still plenty of hurdles to leap. Steam, the PC gaming juggernaut, has a dominant market share and generally offers cheaper prices and a much wider selection. The question is whether the value of cross-platform play could convince PC gamers to make the switch. For console gamers, though, all of this cross-platform support is just icing on the cake. That is, of course, assuming that Microsoft’s able to pull it off this time.

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