Gearbox and the PC gaming divide

A number of media outlets have today reported comments by Gearbox marketing head Steve Gibson claiming that PC gamers who buy a title via Steam cannot play it with someone who purchased it via Games For Windows Live or even retail. Such incompatibilities are to the detriment of PC gaming as a whole, he claimed.

"We want people to be able to play together and right now if a guy buys a game on Games for Windows and a guy buys a game on Steam - they can't play together. If another guy bought it in a retail store, he can't play with the first two guys," Gibson told the London Games Festival blog.

This is simply, and bewilderingly, untrue.

Gibon's claimed motives for his brave statement were a greater harmony amongst the various PC game distributors. "Right now we're like, 'Please, work together'. Our big concern right now is that these silos are being built. Everybody's separating out and it's really... as a developer who just wants gamers to be able to play games together, it's frustrating right now.

"Things like that are hurting the PC industry for gamers. This is frustrating for everybody right now. Call out to the gamers. Hey gamers? Tell these guys to play nice!"

It's hard to judge whether Gibson's comments have been misrepresented, suggest he is somehow not entirely informed on the matter or is perhaps continuing Gearbox's sometime critical campaign against Valve's apparent stranglehold on PC digital distribution. In either case, the take-home message is wholly inaccurate, with the media's blind proliferation of it en masse arguably hurting the perception of the PC industry for gamers.

There is nothing that inherently prevents a purchaser of a game on Steam from playing against someone who has bought it from Games For Windows Live, from retail, from Impulse, from GetGames, or from the back of a van. The game is the game is the game; so long as Gearbox include a multiplayer system in their titles, any PC gamer can play with any PC gamer.

What Gibson may have meant is that, were Gearbox to adopt Valve's increasingly popular Steamworks multiplayer and achievement APIs for Duke Nukem Forever, it would require all players to have a Steam account to play, regardless of their purchase's origin. That doesn't de facto lock out anyone from playing with anyone (Steam accounts are free) but, clearly, presents an impediment to Microsoft wishing to direct-sell it, as they would doubtless prefer it be based around their own Games For Windows Live alternative.

Nothing, however, prevents Games For Windows Live (if that is Gearbox's preferred platform) from operating within a Steam purchase. As the likes of Relic and Rockstar have proven, it's possible to layer on multiple levels of security and community – Dawn of War II's retail version infamously requiring both Steam and GFWL accounts, and GTA IV on PC requiring the additional use of the clunky Rockstar Social Club.

Doing so is not elegant, however, and does harm the PC industry – players risking becoming put off from future purchases because of the time-consuming nag-screens and multiple logins. That is not the norm, but fair-weather players may be fooled into thinking it is. Comments like Gibson's do not help matters in that regard.

The safe alternative is simply to create or lease multiplayer systems that are not tied to a specific platform. PC games have done that for years, each game having its own server tech or a more generalist middleware: it is only a recent phenomenon for them to adopt off-the-shelf closed platforms such as Steamworks and GFWL.

To offer a more bespoke solution would require more work and expense from the developer, of course, and in the case of a game that's leading on console, such as Duke Nukem Forever, mean it cannot simply plug into Xbox Live's achievement and community databases. The problem is one of developers fearing to heavily invest in the ever-changing PC gaming market, not of a foundational technical barrier.

Nonetheless, if Gearbox feels Games For Windows Live is the most appealing system, it has only to adopt it. It will work across any and all versions of the game. The same is true of Steamworks; some carriers may refuse the title on principle if so, but retail and what is universally agreed to be the biggest digital distribution platform would remain in harmony. To state that there is a fundamental multiplayer incompatibility between different PC distribution platforms is simply untrue.

Unfortunately, Gibson's comments have been repeated verbatim by a largely console-orientated online media, many of whom are perhaps not sufficiently familiar with the systems he's discussed to recognise that more nuance is required.