By now I'm sure many of you have noticed that the Games for Windows Marketplace has been closed down.
Old news, sure.
I'm also sure the many of you have heard tale of the fact the Microsoft is planning on shutting down the LIVE service, in particular, the Games for Windows LIVE service as of July of this year.
What would this mean? It basically would mean that nay game that uses the LIVE service for online play, verification or even cloud saving is no longer going to be playable.
Games like Shadowrun, Halo 2, Bulletstorm, Gears of War and many others would be of no use to you anymore.

Well...

Microsoft has been quelling this rumor of late by stating the following:

Oprindeligt skrevet af GameInformer:

We are continuing to support the Games for Windows Live service. As previously announced, as part of the retirement of Microsoft Points the Xbox.com PC marketplace was closed. Although customers are unable to purchase new games from the marketplace or receive title updates, they can continue to enjoy previously purchased content by downloading them through the Games for Windows Live client as usual. We remain committed to investing in PC gaming in the years ahead, and look forward to sharing more in the future.

Note in particular the line:
Although customers are unable to purchase new games from the marketplace or receive title updates, they can continue to enjoy previously purchased content by downloading them through the Games for Windows Live client as usual.

For now at least this means that the service that allows us to play many of these games will stay in place. So hopefully we will not be losing many of these classics to the wind afterall.
Although I do not know for how long this will last, I am hopeful that it will be for some time to come.

At the very least I hope for an alternative way to play some of these games if they can not be played over LIVE in the future, perhaps maybe even Microsoft would release LIVE to Steam or some sort of client that would allow people to set up their own services. That would be nice...

Original article here at http://gameinformer.com