Games For Windows Live stand alone client

As promised a few weeks ago, Microsoft has now released a stand alone client for its Games For Windows Live service. Previously the service was put inside PC games that supported Live but now you can download it and have it ready to go on your desktop without having to start a game up. Unfortunately, the application is criminally simple at the moment, serving as little other than an OS-level store application. Users cannot access their friends list from within the application, nor can they send or receive messages, voice chat, or any of the other features that make Live worth supporting. Users cannot even access their profile, in spite of the application's requirement to log in with Live credentials.

At present, the Games for Windows Live Marketplace offers up a demo of IO Interactive's 2007 buddy-shooter Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, along with videos from the Epic and People Can Fly's PC release of Gears of War, which also hit last year. Microsoft plans to use Games For Windows Live as a way to offer things like add-ons for titles like Fallout 3 and they have also said that having full games for download (a la Steam and Direct2Drive) is in the works as well. Still this first stand alone client release seems almost like a beta with just a few features implemented.