What do you think about the idea that console players can connect and play with PC players, can this be achieved in the future? Could the new generation of consoles be able to do this, at least for some games? What do you think would be the pro's and con's of such a thing at the start.
And was it effective? Could it run stable games? I doubt it would be very popular due to it being for Games for Windows Live. Can this be improved and made with much less problems?
The technology has been around for a decade. It has never gained much popularity, mainly because it's been poorly implemented. I should say that there will never ever ever be cross-platform gameplay between competing consoles (PS3-Xbox), I'm talking about console-PC play. Efforts to do this properly have been half assed and end up being not financially viable because of that. By half assed I mean they've been buggy, and only tried on not very popular games, or implemented on the wrong games. They insist on making it for competitive multiplayer FPS games, which ends up being a disaster because PC gamers have a big advantage in using a mouse to aim. That's what happened to Shadowrun, and the console players stopped playing. Recently it was implemented between the PC and PS3 version of Portal 2, which had co-op multiplayer. It ended up working very well, and is the perfect situation to implement cross platform play. In summary, it's troublesome and takes a lot of effort, and developers don't make proper attempts to improve it. They don't try to improve it because it isn't very financially viable. It isn't financially viable because they do it poorly and for the wrong games. And thus the cycle continues. If they did it properly for the right game people would flock to it. The situation pisses me off. Theoretically it could be done with any reasonably simple multiplayer game that doesn't require fast accurate movements of the mouse/controller, but for reasons I've already stated no one wants to commit.
