Shack: So it's really the multiplayer component that is covered under the exclusivity.

Chris Early: Right. It's that integration of the community. So while you're playing GTA 4, even if you aren't playing multiplayer, you're still connected to your Live network of friends. You can do a game invite for something, you can communicate, do voice chat, messages, and so on. And you're still part of that gaming community.

Whereas if you were to go off and play Spore or something like that, you're totally not available. And even though I want to play with Wolfe, and he's playing Spore, I have no way to get to him. I'd have to call him up and say, "Hey are you busy," and go back to that old-fashioned way. [laughs] And who wants to do that?

Shack: So we're only talking about game functionality here?

Chris Early: You may see that from the standpoint of DLC. I know for Fallout they talked about adding content for a couple of the versions, but not all of the versions.

Shack: In the case of Fallout 3, that DLC will only be available through the GFW Marketplace?

Chris Early: Right.

Shack: So if you bought the game on Steam, you would have to have this program in order to get the DLC.

Chris Early: Well, you'd have this program even if you bought it on Steam. No matter where you get it, whether you get it from Steam or from Best Buy, Games for Windows Live is the community function that is built into the game.

Shack: Piracy is obviously the big issue with PC gaming these days. Valve has started to provide free anti-piracy software in its Steamworks suite. Do you have any interest in providing a piracy solution to publishers?

Chris Early: Well so, a couple things. First off, piracy is a concern. It is something that we're concerned about as Microsoft as a whole, in addition to just from the game service [side], and it's something that we actively work toward minimizing on a regular basis.

We don't distribute full games through this. Our job at the moment is to support whatever anti-piracy mechanism that the publisher wants to use, whether that's SecuROM, ActiveMARK, or Steam system, or anybody's system. And on top of that, I think there are things that we even do today that help along those lines.

The more we build the social structure around Live, the more it makes you want to be a member of this community, the better off we do for piracy, because it's difficult to play a pirated game on Live. You need that five-by-five token to connect to Live. And if you want to maintain a Gamerscore and a set of friends, you kind of have to have a legitimate copy of the game to do that. So that's where I think a lot of the power is going to come from in the long run, because if you really are that member of a gaming community, this is going to help reduce piracy.

When we get to the place where we do distribute games digitally, will we have a digital rights management system? Maybe. Or maybe we'll just continue to support the industry leaders in that. Because it is a hard thing to do. You talk to any of those companies, and that is their whole company, is doing digital rights management. So I think even if we do come out on our own, we're still going to support the industry standards as well.

Shack: You were saying, "When we get to the place where we sell games eventually"?

Chris Early: Did I say that? [huge laughter]

Shack: Because I ask you guys every time we do one of these interviews..

Chris Early: Clearly it's on our road map.

Shack: It's on your road map. So that's what you're looking at as a next step?

Chris Early: Right.

Shack: So this is your DLC effort, and rolling out the infrastructure, and then that will come next.

Chris Early: Right. And if I were to make that choice again today, would I go the same way? I absolutely would. Because this is something that you can't do today on a PC, right? You can buy digitally through a bunch of places. Would it eventually be good that you can buy digitally through here too? Sure. But I would be more concerned right now with providing something that doesn't exist somewhere else.

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