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'Games for Windows - Live' gets a few upgrades

Game for Windows - LIVE (GFWL) is an online gaming service for "Games for Windows"-branded PC games. It functions much like an Xbox Live, but for the PC. On Tuesday Microsoft announced a couple of updates to the service.

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Game for Windows - LIVE (GFWL) is an online gaming service for "Games for Windows"-branded PC games. It functions much like an Xbox Live, but for the PC. On Tuesday Microsoft announced a couple of updates to the service.

In an effort to prevent game piracy, Microsoft will be implementing zero-day piracy protection and server-side authentication, that hopefully will help prevent game piracy before a game's street date, and include added protection for publishers and users by requiring authentication for online play.

To help users access additional game content in the most seamless way possible, GFWL is implementing a new marketplace API that, once implemented, will allow users to purchase additional game content while in-game, apparently without necessitating a restart.

For those of us that call many places our gaming home, lastly on the list is Roaming. Users can now save their personal settings back to their GFWL account in the cloud, providing access to their settings on any compatible and connected Windows PC.

Check out the Steamworks announcement made by valve today to see if you can pick out the similarities.