Shack: The PC gaming crowd can be a tough nut to crack. They can be a demanding bunch, myself included. How have you dealt with that? Do you feel like you're in a place where you understand what we want?

Chris Early: A couple things. One, it's good to be one. I've been a PC gamer for years, and maybe one of the more vocal ones. [laughs] Maybe not as much now. But it's good to have that understanding from that side. It's good to have a little bit of a thick skin too. But part of it is that it's good to listen.

I know that when we launched Games for Windows Live, you could play PC to PC free, but if you wanted to play with Xbox [users] you had to pay $50 to do that. Now was that smart in retrospect, when we listen? No. So we corrected it. Now would it have been better if we had been smart enough to think of that in advance? Yes. But fortunately we had plenty of helpful players who helped "guide" us there. [laughs]

Michael Wolf: [laughs] That was a very political way of putting that. We received some "gentle prodding" from the community.

Chris Early: [laughs] So the key thing I think is, and you probably know this, is to pay attention, right? When you don't pay attention, that's when it really smacks you upside the head.

Now, I'm an impatient guy, and so are most PC gamers, so I'd prefer that we were a lot further along in some of the things that are on our backlog of what to do than we are. But we're not. But after a year and a half of launch, I think we're in really great shape.

When I compare where we are a year and a half, from where Gamespy was a year and a half after launch, or where Mplayer was, the services that I was intimately familiar with--we're in really great shape. And part of that is because we get to build on what Live has as a service infrastructure. We have kind of a hidden advantage there.