As I began installing GTA IV for PC it was hard to tell if I was installing a new game or a new operating system. Naively I thought I had bought and was installing a game, instead of a software suite, but this is how Redmond and Rockstar are playing it. Buy the game, which is already huge, and get a ton of bloatware as a bonus. Between installing Rockstar Social Club, installing the whole Games for Windows infrastructure, both of which expect you to create accounts with them, and their various updates, installing GTA IV for PC was a lot more like installing Microsoft Office than installing a game.

The Microsoft vision, which Rockstar seems to share, is that the way to keep PC gaming competitive, is to make it more like XBox with a whole lot of social networking. The thing is many people actually buy a game in order to play the game, and don’t want to be constantly badgered to sign into another service, even during the game itself. By the time the agonizing neverending installation was done, there were more installations to do. And by the time they were done, there were still more prompts. And when the game crashed 5 minutes later after I had driven by Coney Island and was on my way somewhere in the game world equivalent of Park Slope, and the game bluescreened on me, the first thing I saw on restart was a prompt to sign in to Rockstar Social Club. It’s almost like instead of installing a game, I joined a cult.

(By the way I haven’t seen a blue screen crash in like forever on Windows XP. So thanks Rockstar.)

And the presents just keep on coming, since some people are experiencing a bug in Rockstar Social Club which uses up processing capacity. I quickly unchecked Run When Windows Starts on the Rockstar tray icon, but plenty of players won’t know to do that. And why in the world would you add a program that runs all the time to a game you only play some of the time? I thought that kind of insanity went out even in the EA ranks in the late 90’s. Besides GTA VI, Rockstar doesn’t exactly have that many games people are busy playing. I don’t think that many PC players have Bully installed, which leaves an entire infrastructure dedicated to nothing but GTA IV that runs non-stop unless you disable it.

In the meantime, as is becoming common these days on the PC, the user community is stepping in to help. Again, thanks Rockstar. I can really see the extra time to make that PC port paid off.