Yeah, just look at all those network-ready games on other consoles! Ehhh. Put it in the box, provide easy to implement APIs, and developers will use it. Nobody understands this better than Microsoft.

Except for one little problem. The API for network play on the X-box is the DirectPlay API.

Every single postmortem I read in GameDeveloper magazine, every single one, without fail, always lists DirectPlay somewhere in their "what went wrong" section.

The text is almost boilerplate. Every single time, it says:

"When we first designed <<gamename>>, we wanted to go with the DirectX API's all the way. So we assumed that network play would be easy, using the DirectPlay API's. As a result, we didn't start working on the network play aspect of <<gamename>> until late in the development cycle. When we finally got there, we discovered that the DirectPlay API's are horribly broken, and network play using this system only barely functioned on a LAN and died completely when used on any kind of a public network. As a result we had to <<scrap network play altogether | | scramble to implement our own network code>>."