"and the service’s opening months were marred by bottlenecks and a frustrating online registration experiment.‭ "

Well, that's still the case even now, both the DoW II and Empire launches didn't go all that smooth to put it lightly.

I like Steam but it's essential it doesn't become a monopoly or that the gaming press doesn't exclusively highlight certain Steam pricedrops and special deals. PC gaming should never rely on one company pulling the strings, like it's the case on consoles.

Well, he is biased of course, having worked himself in the FEAR community and on the last addon Perseus Mandate at Timegate but despite that he definitely has a point, FEAR 2 is nowhere near as good or as intelligent as the original game and you can tell that from the overly linear design in the sequel, the AI never seems to get a proper chance to express itself. Monolith even cut the slow motion from the multiplayer, can you believe that?

I couldn't stand it for long, even technical amateur mistakes (on PC then) contribute to the feeling Monolith has lost it quite a bit.

For a studio that has only released three PC games (Far Cry, Crysis and Crysis: Warhead) I am surprised they got the funds to do all these takeovers. Who said you couldn't make money on the PC platform anymore? :)

Kris, while I don't want to neglect possible benefits of Live on PC, going free was a big step already, I didn't have quite the same positive experiences you had with the Live service for those games.

In Fallout 3 there is the savegames problem (you'll save in different directories depending on whether you are connected to Live or not, even though you can manually switch savegames from one map to the to the other, the logic of this is nowhere to be seen) and the fact the buttons for Live are poorly aligned for the mouse (you often misclick, a bit like trying to click on the 'reply' text on this site ;) ).

In DoW II it's all going downhill a bit. For an online RTS there are lots of options missing (it's beta so maybe they will still be added but it's extremely barebones now, ranked and custom play) but more importantly the functionality is extremely poor. The community forums are riddled with reports from NAT negotiation errors (ironically the reason Relic decided to go for Live as MS knew how to handle with this...), malfunctioning TrueSkill matchmaking, lag dropouts and slow login times. For such a great game (which DoW II in mp definitely is) it's a shame to see a matchmaking service that is so out of date when compared to competitors such as Massgate.net, GPGnet, and yes, even Relic Online.

Just saying, they still got a very long way to go.

I think both Dungeon Siege and Sacred surpassed the 1.5 million sales cap and then we're not mentioning the modest success of many other clones (like Divine Divinity) or a behemoth like the Diablo series which just keeps on selling. Those left-click hack & slash games can be a success because instead of a more interesting action/story they just provide loads of items, levels, monsters and skills. It's sheer quantity (and rarely quality) that keeps the player going, looking for the ultimate build. That's the incentive, which isn't that different from MMORPG's but hack & slash games usually have better, more direct combat and no monthly fees. :)

Why Iron Lore didn't receive more recognition and money for Titan Quest is a good question; the game had a lot of hype and virtually no competition at the time but it did ran slowly (not only on gimped pirated versions btw) at random times for no logical reason and it felt more like a product than a game. Cutting out blood effects for marketing/sales reasons in a hack & slash game is also asking for trouble if you ask me. Immortal Throne and modding made it a worthwhile experience (and made a lot of reviewers dig the game again, although that feeling was remarkably more reinforced when Iron Lore was shut down... some folks clearly felt a bit guilty for the 6/10 or 7/10 score they gave to the original) but as I said there are enough reasons to see why TQ didn't made such a splash to keep Iron Lore alive in the long run.

Following up with Soulstorm clearly wasn't a great gift either, a third(!) addon which includes two new races (lots of work)? Madness. Too bad THQ didn't believe in a TQ2, as Diablo III (looking a lot like a more refined TQ visually) shows now there is always a lot of room to improve the hack & slash genre.