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Microsoft's Tray And Play Unveiled

Posted by Zonk on from the quik-start dept.

Gamespot has a look at Microsoft's upcoming plans for PC gaming. In addition to a definite gaming perspective for the Longhorn OS and a commitment to the XNA studios package, they have word that someday we may be loading PC games much like console games. From the article: "Tray and Play is exactly what it sounds like - dropping a game disc into an optical drive and loading it up immediately, rather than having to install it to a hard drive. True to form, the game itself cut straight to a start-up screen in less than a minute (including the game's own built-in load time)."

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  1. Inevitable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd been wondering how long this would take...

    Although many people have said, over the last couple of years, that Microsoft intends to kill off the PC as a gaming platform, in the hopes of transporting users over to its own X-Box, I've never believed that this is true. Windows' status as the "gaming OS" is almost certainly a factor in keeping it installed on any number of home PCs. However, there's no denying that PC gaming has had a difficult time of late (although perhaps not so difficult in the second half of 2004, when it finally got some big exclusive releases) and it desperately needs to be more competative with the console market. With keyboard and mouse support in games likely to be more common in the next console generation, this is more urgent than ever.

    Now, I used to be a die-hard PC gamer. I've been gaming on the PC since the days when buying a new game meant an hour tweaking config.sys, autoexec.bat and playing with memmaker just to get the right memory configuration for the damned thing to run. When I finally overcame my long-standing aversion to consoles a couple of years ago and bought a PS2, I was amazed by how much simpler and lower-hassle the whole process is on a console. Even today, playing a PC game involves checking that your system meets the specification, sitting through an install process which could take anywhere from a couple of minutes through to half an hour, depending on the game and your system, determining the settings which will give you the best balance between appearance and performance and then quite often searching for patches to fix the bug that makes the game crash every 5 minutes on your hardware configuration. That this puts people off is hardly a surprise.

    Microsoft's move here is, at least, a first step towards remedying this situation.