Anaron, on 11 December 2010 - 15:10, said:
. That unified social gaming experience can't be found on the PC.
actually it's called steam, and it's easier there. a large fraction of games on teh pc are available on steam. the biggest splinter for pc gaming social networking is blizz vs steam, and you can still tell your steam friends you're playing a blizz game automatically everytime you launch them by adding them to steam and launching from there(i honestly wish they'd take this one step furtherand detect the .exe launch automatically from teh desktop short cut for example). and with steam i can create my own community page, add members and post, set up events, monitor members game time usage and other stats, link pics and videos, text chat, start voice chat with online members, post links to my voice chat server of choice(mumble vent ts3) all without ever launching the game first, and switchign between games i don't even have to get out of my seat, or stop voice chatting with my friends.
sorry to rain on your parade.
when i get my xbox s i am going to be refreshing myself on xbl and see if it's any easier to set up streaming from a pc running windows(7) than it was 3 years ago, when it was huge pita and siuffered from poor bit rate, large network traffic, and huge use of the the pc's reosurces to encode the stream from one format to another in real time, not to mention being dificult to set up and not exactly straight forward even with ms's own guide. i'm optimisitic given how fast and easy it was to set up streaming to my netbook, also running win7, and hearing about greater multi media integration with xbl and dashboard updates and such.
i'm also thinking of getting netflix for both my pc and my xbox. it would be nice to be able to choose wether to watch streaming media on my chair in 1080p or laying on my couch in 720p.
overall i'm pretty psyched to get the xbox, alot more so than the ps3. there's actually more than one game on xbox i'm interested in, and tbh had i known that game i bought he ps3 for was on xbox i would've got that instead.
overall for the xbox set up i spent about umm $7-800 up front not including the couch i already have. that's a 32" 720p tv, an xbox 250gb slim bundled with an extra controller, a stand for the tv and xbox, a game, ms points card, and xbl gold sub card. still cheaper than my (lower) high end pc and furniture though, admittedly.