Halo 1 used Gamespy systems and Halo 2 used Games For Windows Live, which failed miserably.

Crysis and Crysis Wars have used Gamespy and honestly, I think they could do better with another system, but sure as hell not GFWL, and EA Servers are also absolutely horrendous.

I am fine with Steam though.

Yeah, but what have Halo 3 and Halo Reach used? They have the best servers in my opinion. No lag and the connection almost never has to migrate to a different connection. I agree with you though, Steam is reliable.

They are console only and use Peer2Peer networking.

Peer2Peer does not work well for a first person shooter on the PC. If you have played Modern Warfare 2 with IWNet then you know why it fails miserably.

They are console only and use Peer2Peer networking.

Peer2Peer does not work well for a first person shooter on the PC. If you have played Modern Warfare 2 with IWNet then you know why it fails miserably.

Well then the P2P system they're using is brilliant because it always picks the best host connection. Crytek needs to get in touch with the people at Bungie and figure out how they did it.

For the console version that is okay.

For the PC version though, P2P is simply not a good option. A computer completely dedicated to handling the server's processing requests with 25mb/s upload will always beat out some random persons computer that might have a good internet connection (which would be the main determining factor), but they could also have a Pentium 4 which can't handle the processing requests of hosting a server.

It can work for the console market since all the hardware is the same and the developers can code to let the host handle the requests of processing. However, the PC market is too unpredictable to pick a reliable host most of the time due to the differences in all of our hardware, which may or may not be sufficient to handle a server. The developers can't really code to detect that stuff when choosing a host (not without locking up your computer for 15 seconds each round while it scans invasively, which would be very annoying and could invade privacy), so its guesswork at best as to who gets hosting. This results in lag issues with P2P networking.