What I’ll think you’ll see is a standalone application, not necessarily built into the operating system. When Microsoft does anything with the operating system we have to be really careful because of the consent decree with the (US) Department of Justice. So that’s a very tricky question which I don’t think a lot of people understand.
Will we make it so that you don’t to be playing a game to get access to Games for Windows Live? Absolutely yes. Is it going to be part of the box that you buy off the store shelf, i.e. the operating system? Probably not.
What about a sidebar gadget or something?
However it’s going to come out. Here’s what I want as a gamer, I want to know what my friends are doing and what they are playing and access to my gaming community stuff while I’m not in the middle of a game. I want you to be able to send me an invite when I’m in the middle of work because I don’t want to work, I want to play. But I don’t want to be sitting there watching it the entire time. You gotta have that active presence available to me and have that be my launch pad to whatever it is I want to do in the gaming world.
One of the things that was kind of a stealth announcement was that LIVE is now coming to XP. Number one, why was this done and number two how are you going to roll it out. Will it continue to be rolled into the games or will you push some of that functionality out into an application.
XP support has always been a part of our roadmap it’s just not been something that we announced up front from day one. If you think about the work that we’ve had to do from a technical side there’s the LIVE structure core, there’s a set of Xbox functions that access that LIVE core and that’s Xbox Live.
Then we’ve spent the first year or so making the Vista extensions to that LIVE service so they could work on Vista and we spent the next nine months or so working on the XP extensions to that which are now ready to hand out to developers.
Now we have three operating systems to support. I say three because while two of them are Windows, Vista and XP are way different operating systems. So for us to implement the same levels of security on XP that we have on Vista is a lot more work and that’s what caused that delay between releases. Now all those games that come out this holiday that are out on Games for Windows Live will all have XP support. So it’s the same core set of API’s that goes into any Windows game.
When you want to go Gold it’s because you want to go cross-platform, when you want to play against the Xbox. When you want to get multi-player achievements, when you want to get the True skill matchmaking, that’s when your gold membership comes into play.
Obviously this is before your time but last year at E3 they showed off the whole LIVE Anywhere concept …
That was before my Windows LIVE time, that was me talking a lot last year.
One of the things they showed off last year was the cool cell phone client, are we going to see that this year?
This year? Don’t know. Future, yes.
