Games for Windows Live launched in may 2007. The idea was that microsoft would take the things that worked on xbox live (achievements, friends list, online multiplayer) and bring them to pc games. On paper this sounded fine. In practice it was the most hated thing in pc gaming for about seven years.
The problem was that GfWL did not feel like an option you opted into. It felt like a tax. To launch a game that used it, you had to start the game, then it would launch GfWL, then GfWL would ask you to sign in to your microsoft account, then it would update itself, then sometimes it would crash, then you would launch the game again. Then you would actually be able to play. Maybe.
This was for single player games. The whole reason most people were buying these games was to play offline. GfWL was sitting there asking for an internet connection and a sign-in just so you could save your fallout 3 progress. Nobody had asked for this.
| Born | 8 May 2007 |
|---|---|
| Killed | 4 July 2014 (servers shut down) |
| Lifespan | 7 years, 2 months |
| Made by | Microsoft Game Studios |
| Required | a Microsoft account, even for offline games |
| Made famous by | Fallout 3, Bioshock 2, GTA IV, Dark Souls |
| Killed by | Steam, the rage of pc gamers, Microsoft itself |
Games published with GfWL had specific problems that became infamous in the pc gaming community.
Save files were tied to your account. If your account had a problem, your saves were not portable. People lost progress because GfWL did not feel like signing them in that day.
The interface was a popup. Pressing home would bring up an in-game GfWL overlay. The overlay was slow. The overlay would sometimes break the game's mouse cursor. Modders had to work around it.
Patches required GfWL to be working. Some games could not be patched without going through GfWL, and GfWL servers were not always reliable.
It made games stop working years later. When microsoft turned off the servers in 2014, some games could no longer be installed at all from a fresh setup, because the install process needed GfWL to verify something. People who owned legitimate copies of GTA IV had to find unofficial workarounds to keep their game playable.
Microsoft slowly admitted that GfWL was not working. Around 2013 they started telling publishers to remove it from their games. A bunch of games released in 2013 and 2014 came with patches that quietly stripped the GfWL dependency out and replaced it with steamworks or with nothing.
On 4 july 2014 the GfWL marketplace was shut down. The actual sign-in service kept limping along for a while longer, mostly so that older games could still authenticate, but the product was effectively dead by then. Microsoft moved its pc gaming attention to the xbox app on windows 10, which was a different product and made different mistakes.
GfWL was the lesson that pc gamers needed to learn before steam could become what steam became. By being so bad, GfWL made steam look amazing by comparison. Steam was already strong by 2007, but it was the contrast with GfWL that solidified steam's position as the only acceptable way to do this kind of thing.
There is a smaller cultural lesson too. GfWL is one of the rare cases where a microsoft product failed because of how openly people hated it. People wrote angry forum posts. People made blog rants. Modders made unofficial patches just to remove it. The whole pc gaming community mobilized against this thing for seven years until microsoft finally killed it. That kind of organized rejection is rare in tech.
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