Microsoft
announced a few new features for Games for Windows at GDC today. The first is a new anti-piracy feature which will require authentication to G4W servers for a game to run. The feature is aimed at the zero day pirates who get the game ahead of it's release date. While details are scarce I'm not sure that this is really going to prevent much in the long run as authentication server hacks have been taken out of games before.
The second feature is an in game marketplace which will allow you to buy games through the Games For Windows client. This might be a cool feature if it means we're finally getting a G4W client that's built into the OS and doesn't require us to fire up a game to play.
The final feature allows you to save your settings to the cloud and pull them down on another computer when you log in. Steam has had this for a few months and it's a fairly handy feature when you have to rebuild your computer or go home for vacation and want to play your games on another PC.
It's not a bad set of features but I would have liked to see Microsoft do something more innovative like moving saved game files to the cloud as that would allow for real game portability. I would love to be able to play
Dawn of War II on my lunch breaks but there's no way to sync the files between computers without a lot of file copying. Hopefully we'll get something like that in the future but I'm not holding my breath.
