It's hard to believe Microsoft is strengthening its investment in GfW after ditching the top guy and ditching their top in-house game, Flight Simulator and the development team.

Pay attention to Microsoft's actions, not their words.

Microsoft is rotting from the top down. MS simply can't grow any larger without bringing in new blood or coming up with new technologies beyond Windows. They simply can't dominate outside of the Windows/Office space.

I seem to see these announcements every few months but I still see shoddy console port after shoddy console port released using the "Games for windows" badge. Just about all of them show an Xbox controller when you try to reconfigure the controls and tell you to press start to get to the main menu. Supporting windows as a game platform, pfft...

What's even more funny is that games are what keep Windows afloat (or rather directx and d3d.) Take that away and everyone would just as well switch to osx/linux.

Not really... I don't use Linux because I don't know how to use the console and put those crazy codes... If I buy a OS I don't want to loose time shaping it, I just want it to work, and for it to be compatible with other people. And the games (and apps) as u mention, sometimes don't work in Linux.

D3D is the key that helps windows to be the best gaming platform! if Linux can bring forward its gaming solution, We will choose Linux!!

v3ctor,
You must not know anything about recent linux distributions, they work out of the box just fine, install easier than windows and unless you want to tinker with it then you'll never have to enter "crazy codes."

I was talking about OSX more seriously than linux though.

Bethsedia's First major mistake GFW. This system is HORRIBLE. Next time someone comes to microsoft and asks for something to be distributed, MS should just tell them to go to valve since GFW is horrendous.

Linux and MacOS have OpenGL which works just fine.

The GFW system isnt as what it can be yet but seeing where its coming from im not too pissed off with it. I got Gears of War for windows when it came out on my Vista machine, the first few days i couldnt play the game properly becuase GFW kept crashing it(they fixed it though), nowadays i load it up right from the box and it works, it updates it with all the patches it needs.All the games that use GFW now do that automatically, i dont need to waste time running to this site for that patch, when i load the game up it just downloads and installs it(I wish Battlefeild was like that).Id like some warning before hand as most times i load the game up i actually want to play it right then and there, but i let it do its thing and it restarts the game no fuss.The voice chat i find is horrendous though and and 30% of the time it wont connect but meh, nothing to raise my blood pressure over.

yes grims, but opengl is limited and obsolete.. the latest revision of opengl is 2.1 i think is the one that is available to public, and is lacking like 89 percent of nowadays card features.. so if you are a top game company that want to use the bells and whistles of the new video technology you wont go to opengl simple because you will be limited in the development of your game.

it is true, opengl is very stable and fast, but that is as far as it go.

The latest version is 3.0 and it has been out since August '08. It's still behind DX in some areas but it's a step forward.