A year ago this month, at the last really big E3 ever, Microsoft announced its Live Anywhere initiative, promising to rapidly extend Xbox Live to the PC and cell phones. Finally, your Xbox Live friends list, achievements, Live Arcade, and all that other good stuff would be accessible on those other platforms with over 100 million gamers. I was absolutely giddy. They didn't show the service off per se, but rather had a mock-up demonstration of what it would be like. You'd be sitting there on your PC and someone on the Xbox 360 would see you online, invite you into a cross-platform game, and away you'd go.

Live on the PC is nothing like that mock-up demo a year ago. It's Vista-only, which I guess I can understand. They want to move Vista as the gaming platform, not just Windows PCs in general. Perhaps Vista's networking security stuff is actually necessary for Live, I dunno. Okay, fine…we need to buy your expensive new OS to use Live. Fair enough. I can still sit there browsing the web and get a game invite or a message over Live, right? Or set up a Live voice or video chat? Nope. Live on the PC only runs while you're actually playing a Live-enabled game. So in order for my friends to see me online on my PC, I have to actually have Halo 2 or Shadowrun running. This sort of defeats the point, and it's not the way the 360 has worked for the last 18 months.

The biggest mistake Microsoft is making with Live on the PC is the way they're treating the PC as if it's a console platform they can control. They're trying to lock out the rest of the world and to charge for features that PC gamers have had for free for ages. It's a shortsighted, greedy scheme that could only come from a product manager or VP who simply doesn't "get" PC gaming. The free Silver level of Xbox Live lets you log in on the PC and earn Achievements just like you do on the 360—but only single-player Achievements. Multiplayer Achievements are only for those $50-a-year Gold members. Player matchmaking is for Gold members only. Voice in games is for Gold members only. Cross-platform play between 360 and PC is for Gold members only. In fact, the only thing silver members can really do is view a server list and hop onto a specific server.

The problem is, PC gamers have had a lot of this stuff free for years. We've had integrated voice chat in games for nearly a decade, and it's been free in most games. You can go back to Unreal Tournament 2003 (released in 2002) for an example of an old game with free voice chat, or look at the new Lord of the Rings Online (a Games for Windows branded game) for a more recent example. Gamers use Ventrillo or Teamspeak for games that don't have integrated voice components. They use Skype or various IM services for free messaging and voice chat. XFire is free, and it gives you messaging, in-game text chat, in-game voice chat, one-click joining the same server as your friends, and manages patches and downloads for lots of games. In many ways, it's twice what Live is on the PC, and it's free.

Live is a platform, and as such, it requires support from developers and publishers to be successful. Thus far, the only publisher to support it is Microsoft. When was the last time Microsoft announced a software or hardware platform with no third party support at all? Of course no developer is going to support Live on the PC.