I hate Games for Windows Live. I love the potential, but currently I think it’s a horrible, horrible excuse for an online system. It’s completely gimped in comparison with Xbox Live, and ultimately worthless right now; I could go on and on, but frankly it’s just not ready for mainstream use, and doesn’t warrant any sort of subscription fee. And as far as cross-platform play goes… so far, not the greatest thing in the world. And I’m not the only who thinks so – in an interview with IGN, Infinity Ward’s Grant Collier stated:

Our rep left us a message saying ‘hey, want to talk about this, Live Anywhere, it’s big, it’s cool’, and I thought, well yeah, if you’re playing online poker, but who wants to be playing an RTS on a console and have some guy on a PC clicking and dragging all his troops, attacking your base while you’re sitting there with your thumb sticks. So I think for FPSs and RTSs, no way, but for, y’know, card games or Tetris or something like that. There are games that I think it’s cool for, but there are other games where I don’t think there’s any point. So they just didn’t respond.

So if you’re looking for a safe bet to make with an uninformed friend, gambling that Call of Duty 4 won’t be featuring cross-platform play is about as safe as you can get.