One of the features gamers may have been looking forward to on Microsoft’s Live gaming service was the ability for Xbox 360 players to compete against PC players in a multiplayer game. But the promise of such a feature has apparently now disappeared as Microsoft has canned the project.

News of the cancellation came via Rahul Sood, founder of Voodoo PC and CTO of HP’s Gaming Business. He explained the reason why in a blog post:

"I’ve heard from reliable sources that during the development they brought together the best console gamers to play mediocre PC gamers at the same game… and guess what happened? They pitted console gamers with their “console” controller, against PC gamers with their keyboard and mouse.

The console players got destroyed every time. So much so that it would be embarrassing to the XBOX team in general had Microsoft launched this initiative."

So unfortunately if you were looking forward to killing your PC gaming friend while playing on your Xbox 360, it just isn’t going to happen. Keyboard and mouse against console joypad is just not a fair match up.

Read more at Rahul Sood’s blog, found via SlashGear

Matthew’s Opinion

I’m sure I’ll get some complaints for saying this, but it doesn’t matter how much you tweak a game like Halo for joypad control you will always get a faster (better?) experience using a keyboard and mouse. It’s just a setup that works better for certain games allowing for faster movement speed, more precise aiming (without aids), and full use of both hands (more keys and more buttons on a mouse to be used). This is just my experience, however, results may vary and a joypad ninja may be able to take me to the cleaners on many an FPS.

If Microsoft had managed to pull off this crossover gaming it would have been a big hit and probably made the Live service on PC much more popular. But if the games are unfair then it just can’t happen unless you limit PC gamers to using joypads, or start selling Xbox 360 keyboards and mice. That’s unthinkable so the only course of action was to cancel the project.