No Xbox Live subscription for Windows 10 online multiplayer needed

A poorly conceived Microsoft based gaming marketplace for PC. Their original team was eventually disbanded because they were so fucking horrible. Just to give you a taste, the UI was designed to draw attention to itself and away from the game, purposely invaded your game's screen space and would continue to do so without warning and with no way of turning it off, it was horribly intrusive, slow, prone to failure of all sorts - and it failing irrespective of your game's running state and would automatically kick you out of a game and it needed to be constantly connected to at least one account and one accounts library once logged into locked all other games attached to that account instead of just that game. Making an account was a long, trying process, even making a password was heavily prone to error, as you could make a password for your account longer and with more symbols than the actual end password & username logging/checking system would accept once it came time to sign-in. That's how poorly put together it was. You could permanently lock yourself out of your account before your first sign-in.

And for something that offered you nothing but game after game ruining headaches it topped it off by, in it's early days, constantly nagging you to pay a fee to play games and talk with your friends a game you already bought from completely different companies with different publishers. They were a rent seeking parasite on the back of these games, bloated DRM, that wanted money for tacked on poorly thought out chat features. Which, of course, has always been free through using superior services such as the former gamespy, teamspeak, aim, trillian(and whatever sub-services), steam, or Microsoft's very own Skype...

Microsoft's GFWL team thought the PC player base was gullible, lazy, and retarded, they weren't, PC gamer's aren't the run of the mill consumer computer users that they had assumed they were duping and as a result their plans failed miserably. Steam and other supporting services were all free and making strides in improving user experience in the opposite directions. They didn't demand that games they supported use their servers, like Microsoft, whose servers were constantly on a field trip. Overall the entire experience was a nightmare from beginning to end and people would stop buying games that needed to use GFWL altogether and once that started happening publishers where going back and retroactively making it so their games no longer needed GFWL at all. Well that continued for awhile and then Microsoft finally started dismantling the GFWL hellscape altogether. It was one of the worst, if not the worst, electronic entertainment market place, in the history of online markets.

/r/Games Thread Link - twitter.com