Topic: Microsoft Games On Demand Service

[Xessive]

Microsft has launched its Games On Demand service, along with update 3.2 of Games For Windows Live. The collection is still paltry.

[idolminds]

They've got a free game "Tinker" to download. Looks kinda neat, so I'll give it a whirl.

Though they kinda pissed me off. Just after I installed the update I noticed that my connection was being used, downloading something in short little bursts even with the GFWL client not even running. Turns out it turned the BITS service back on for background downloading. Hate it break it to them but I don't have a background to download from, so that crap can just fuck right off. Disabled it again.

[Xessive]

Yeah, any active downloads in GFWL will continue to download even after you close the client. To stop it from doing that you have to "pause" any active downloads before closing the client. It's supposed to give you a warning message telling you that this is happening if you try to close the client while it's downloading. Either way it's not an impressive suite of services. Microsoft would be better off affiliating with Steam or Impulse instead.

[scottws]

They've got a free game "Tinker" to download. Looks kinda neat, so I'll give it a whirl.

Though they kinda pissed me off. Just after I installed the update I noticed that my connection was being used, downloading something in short little bursts even with the GFWL client not even running. Turns out it turned the BITS service back on for background downloading. Hate it break it to them but I don't have a background to download from, so that crap can just fuck right off. Disabled it again.

Yeah, that's very bad behavior for someone on dial-up.  To be fair to Microsoft, a huge majority of Internet users are are broadband now and things just aren't really made with dial-up even being a consideration anymore.  Try going to the Smokey Bones restaurant web page sometime.  It's slow even on broadband.

But at the same time, how hard would it be to have one of those "What's your connection speed?" dialogs when you first load it up?  Then you could put in 56.6kbps and they would have some code that turns off the background downloading.  Don't seem like a toughie to me.