More competition for video game consoles...from good old PCs. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Online game play is simple with the Xbox360 or Sony's PlayStation 3. And what Microsoft is trying to do is sort of emulate that experience on Windows based PCs....with Games for Windows Live....which is now free...and newly revamped. Senior marketing manager Michael Wolf....

"When you connect to Games for Windows Live you're still connecting to the same account as on Xbox Live and you have that singular identity across both platforms. But what we're doing is really sort of looking at Games for Windows Live ...and rather than making it an extension of the live service on console, we're focusing on developing a great gaming service for Wndows gamers. And so we're trying to do some things on the service where we're making it more accessible to PC gamers, making the design of it a little bit more PC gaming friendly. And we're going to be delivering content through a marketplace where consumers are going to go and download new content, access premium downloadable content. Just make the overall experience much more simple and create a great gaming service for PC gamers."

Microsoft has been encouraging game makers to buy into its Games for Windows certification program. Expect even more of an emphasis on the PC as a game machine when the next version of Windows arrives. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.