Would an Application Store work for PC?

A one stop place to publish and to buy games and all sorts of other PC applications.

 

The PC being what it is, it's more likely there would be many such stores...
...and this is what we find.

Maybe Microsoft will enforce it's one ring policy once again and further lock the system down.

 

I always thought we'd see the Game Explorer thing expand to be a marketplace, although Europe would probably own them for doing that sort of thing.

 

That's what the PC needs. A big massive monopoly.


Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to buy more cheap games on Steam that I'll never get around to playing.

 

There are cheap games on Steam?

 

how about many online stores, to get a bit of competition going?

 

There are enough 50% off sales to make me buy more than I'll play.

 

What we really need is a common framework for all of these game systems to use.

Walled-gardens like GfWL and Steam only work within their own system.

A better way would be to have things like friends lists, achievements and other game data and functionality exposed via a common API that any application could interface with.

Almost like a tower of babel for PC gaming. People could use any game management system they liked, and games would remain platform-agnostic - saving the need for developers to choose between Steam/GfW/Gamespy/whatever.

 

Time has shown that what it takes to make these services work are companies with professional support staff and marketing.

How could you get them all together to work under the same store with their competitors?

Seems like Steam has won the battle for hard core pc games. Facebook is winning with social games. Casual games seems a bit more fragmented.

Even efforts like Windows Games Live don't work on Mac or Linux which increasingly become important.

 

It's really about open standards.

You can look at things like RSS on the web to see how an open format can become a de facto standard.

Even in lieu of a real standard, if each game to provide "hooks" in, I'm sure either platform developers (or even the gaming community) would provide wrappers for new games.

 

I don't know about that. Typically there's a lot of work to hook up to each service, and add to that publishers get cross-promotional deals to work only with certain services.