Age of Empires III is currently going for 10c/10p on Games For Windows

[andrewducker]

Here.

You need to have a MS Live account (the same one that's used for an MSN chat account, or for XBox Live). In fact, it takes you through the XBox Live signup, which was slightly confusing. You'd think they'd streamline that, or at least put different branding on it.

But for 10p, who can complain?

Edit: And after setting up my account, I popped back to the page and it referred to me as "WailedNeptune7", and I thought something had gone drastically wrong with their login system. But no, it had just assigned me a random "Gamertag", and then started referring to me by that name. I know MS are shit with usability, but really, What The Fuck?

Comments

[matgb]

Nope, I've always had a gmail account, signed up before the fuss.

[matgb]

Another thought occurs. I wonder if they've got a special deal with Visa. I just paid 10p by my visa card. But Visa normally charge a %age of sale price, with a minimum charge of 50p. It's possible I just cost MS some money.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The game is a couple of gigs in size, you probably cost them some bandwidth too

[matgb]

True, but that should be factered across the site as a whole.

I'm just impressed that they're running a promo of this nature that almost certainly costs them more money per transaction, before taking other costs into account.

ThatI haven't got it working yet, and they don't seem to have given me a CD key, is a different thing.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Once the game is downloaded, in the main GFW menu, click onto the game to get the full details of it. There's a CD key there.

It gets people using GFW. Some companies don't like Steamworks because it means you'll play a game and end up seeing ads for whatever Valve are advertising in Steam at that point, before you play the game. With GFW, microsoft are hoping they can promote other games that they sell.

[matgb]

Aha, thank you. Finding that was not intuitive.

I've never used Steam (this low spec netbook is the highest spec machine I've ever owned, not much of a gamer), but I'm guessing they've managed, due to their success, to have a UI that doesn't suck mightily.

So far, I've been pissed off enough to shout at the screen three times with GFW, for one 10p DL.

This machine has the spec for Rome Total War, just, which I've always wanted to play. So I looked at the screenshots.

0n a 600px high monitor, the button to close the screenshot display floats to above the top menu bar. If I look at screenshots, I can't stop looking at them without quitting the programme.

(Or, obviously, go plug it into the monitor, but that means getting out of bed)

But yeah, competition good, I just hope they fix the sucky UI, else they won't get very far.