Yesterday marked the first push in a new PC gaming strategy for Microsoft.

With the release of a new Games for Windows Live interface, the announcement of a DLC-focused Marketplace, and the mention of plans to bring full PC digital distribution to the service, Microsoft has finally given us a reason to take a hard look at their PC philosophy.

Conveniently, I recently had the chance to sit down and throw a number of questions at Games for Windows general manager Chris Early and marketing manager Michael Wolf.

How is this new Marketplace going to work? What kind of cut is Microsoft getting on sales? What does it mean when a game is a Games for Windows Live exclusive? What does this mean for Windows 7? Find out the answers to these questions and more below.

Shack: So the Marketplace consists of this desktop application, and you can grab demos, videos and downloadable content. I assume you can keep it running in the background, in your tray?

Chris Early: Right, you could keep it running all the time, or you could not keep it running. When the game goes to convert you to purchasing some additional content it will fire this up, and this is where you do your transaction.

So you will buy a piece of add-on content, this will manage the download of it--because you know, on Windows, we don't really know how big that piece of DLC is. I've talked to some publishers who are already thinking hundreds of megabytes for a piece of DLC. So it's not just the kind of thing where you want to say, "I'll buy now," and just instantly download without any kind of management process. So not knowing that in advance, we kind of have to manage whatever that situation might be.

Shack: And the application itself--is it fairly lightweight? What kind of system resources does it consume?

Chris Early: This? Not very much at all. It's not a real-time, live connection, so it's not taking up a lot of bandwidth. Now if you're downloading it's going to obviously consume some bandwidth, but that's why it's a smart manager--it doesn't do that while you're playing a game.

Shack: How long have you guys been working on the interface revision and Marketplace?

Chris Early: This is a major effort for Live overall. As you probably know from the Xbox side, Marketplace is evolving not only from the standpoint of DLC, but videos and all kinds of other things.

When I first started working for Microsoft about three years ago, I helped bring about Xbox Live Arcade, which is an extension of Marketplace. So Marketplace as the underlying service continues to evolve, and what we're doing on the GFW Live side of it is now exposing more of that to Windows publishers so they can start to take advantage of that.

And we focused on the areas first that were practically non-existent on the PC. The whole concept of being able to buy extensions to your game easily doesn't exist on the PC today. It's back to that--set up a relationship with a credit card vendor, then look at fraud prevention, etc. And it's just a pain. What publisher wants to go into that business? Very few of them.

Shack: The PC gaming crowd can be a tough nut to crack. They can be a demanding bunch, myself included. How have you dealt with that? Do you feel like you're in a place where you understand what we want?

Chris Early: A couple things. One, it's good to be one. I've been a PC gamer for years, and maybe one of the more vocal ones. [laughs] Maybe not as much now. But it's good to have that understanding from that side. It's good to have a little bit of a thick skin too. But part of it is that it's good to listen.

I know that when we launched Games for Windows Live, you could play PC to PC free, but if you wanted to play with Xbox [users] you had to pay $50 to do that. Now was that smart in retrospect, when we listen? No. So we corrected it. Now would it have been better if we had been smart enough to think of that in advance? Yes. But fortunately we had plenty of helpful players who helped "guide" us there. [laughs]

Michael Wolf: [laughs] That was a very political way of putting that. We received some "gentle prodding" from the community.

Chris Early: [laughs] So the key thing I think is, and you probably know this, is to pay attention, right? When you don't pay attention, that's when it really smacks you upside the head.

Now, I'm an impatient guy, and so are most PC gamers, so I'd prefer that we were a lot further along in some of the things that are on our backlog of what to do than we are. But we're not. But after a year and a half of launch, I think we're in really great shape.

When I compare where we are a year and a half, from where Gamespy was a year and a half after launch, or where Mplayer was, the services that I was intimately familiar with--we're in really great shape. And part of that is because we get to build on what Live has as a service infrastructure. We have kind of a hidden advantage there.

Shack: So you'll be serving all of this content up through Live? Every 100 megabyte patch comes through Microsoft's servers?

Chris Early: Right, so just like on Xbox Live, this is part of the Live service. The updates are all handled by Live, so that you are on the most current version of the game as long as you're connected online. Which again comes back to helping the publisher, because they reduce their support costs, because now you're not having to deal with all the different versions.

This helped us get to that place where we went to the publishers and they said yes, in a big way. They said yes with their AAA titles, with those franchises that--and I have to say I'm kind of pleased, because that means they're willing to risk their franchises on these services, and we're delivering for them.

Shack: A number of weeks ago, the Grand Theft Auto IV PC port was announced as a Games for Windows Live exclusive, and I could never get anyone to tell me what exactly that meant. Does it preclude it from being sold on Steam? What are the terms of a GFW exclusivity deal?

Chris Early: No. Okay, so, from the standpoint of showing up on digital download services, that's nothing that we want to restrict at all.

If you want to buy the game, I don't really care where you want to buy it, as long as you buy it. Don't pirate it. Please. [laughs] Buy that game at Wal-mart, Best-Buy, buy it from Steam, Direct 2 Drive, wherever--Games for Windows Live supports that.

Now what it means by exclusive is that the only game services that are built into it, the only way you play it multiplayer, the only community functions that are supported there are the Games for Windows Live community.

Turn the page for more.