Like what, exactly?

I'd much rather all games were DRM-free, but Steam just works. GFWL, on the other hand, is another Microsoft abomination.

I only own one GFWL game: GTA4. I bought it on Steam, yet it made me waste half an hour setting up a GFWL account just to play it. Then, when I do play it, I first have to start Steam, then I have to tell it I actually don't want to log into some crappy Rockstar service, then I have to log into GFWL, which means I have to hunt around to find the stupid login and password I set up years ago, then GFWL tells me it has to update, then it tells me I have to restart the game, or possibly even my PC, in order to play it just because it has GFWL that I never wanted, or the update fails, and I have to go to Microsoft's web site to manually download the latest version, uninstall the old version, and install it. Then I have go to through the whole thing again to actually play a game.

This is why I hate GFWL more than any other piece of crap Microsoft has foisted on me over the years, and why I'll never knowingly buy another GFWL game again. Microsoft continue to treat users as though they never do anything useful with their computers and don't care about wasting time rebooting just to update some Microsoft software they never wanted in the first place.

You pretty much just summarized my experience with GTA4 also, but you're being far too kind and leaving out all the nasty details, holes needing to be poked in the firewall and other headaches as well, but then it would risk turning into a "tl;dr" post I suppose. :)

It certainly took long enough to get an official word. They have had the better part of a year to give some kind of feedback, and they waited until a we were counting in days which is real weird unless there was some debate on its future. If I had to guess, they didn't even know for sure what they were going to do, and basically waited until the last minute to change their mind about what precisely was going to happen.

I guess it's good things will still work, but it sounds like GFWL will be running in support mode only. Probably for a year or two.

The GFWL service is still dead, they're just not turning off the servers for existing stuff just yet. Which is good, for those who want to keep playing those games' multiplayer aspects.

I hope they still remove the actual DRM aspect from the few games that use it, though. Seems silly not to at this point.

Thanks for the info :) I almost bought Bulletstorm but I don't want to deal with GFWL anymore (it kept giving me trouble so I uninstalled it once BioShock 2 and Arkham City removed it). I'm disappointed that Bulletstorm hasn't removed the GFWL requirement at least for the single-player aspect (although it would make sense to migrate the multiplayer over to Steam as well).

I got MKK to run without any GFWL installation, by simply copying xlive.dll and xlive.dll.cat into the Binaries\Win32 subfolder, then making an offline account on first run. These files can come either from an existing GFWL installation, or by extracting them from its msi. You're probably savvy enough to know how that works, though you might want to use ORKA to identify them; they need renaming. The online functions are obviously disabled, but I'm perfectly capable of playing vs the AI. Which is quite the turn-off, given how badly it cheats :P

I was actually surprised how benign GFWL behaved when run offline.

GTA is probably tougher to crack, but I think there are actual xlive.dll cracks out there, to help with savegames, etc. (as there were for Fallout 3). Section 8, I know nothing about, sorry.

If GFWL/RSC et al remain online for GTA4 I'll probably continue to play it the way it was intended just to not have to muck around, and hopefully finish it and the expansions and wear the game out enough to put it on the "completed games list" and move on to something else - hopefully. If I don't manage to do that and the servers go down I'll probably hack it with something. I've heard of something called Xliveless which allegedly can work around these problems but I haven't looked into it.

Haven't tried MK yet but will have to have a look at that. Section 8 works for now although I had problems getting it working at first. It's a really short single-player game which is more of a training mission for multiplayer and I'm about half way through it I think. Probably one or two gaming sessions left and I'll be done with that. I might fire up multi-player just to try it out but it's probably not my thing so no big deal on that game. :)

Oh ffs!
Just when we thought the bag of expletive that is GFWL was going away....

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/06/23/microsoft-say-they-are-continuing-to-support-the-games-for-windows-live-service/

I`d rather it vanished & all games were "fixed".

I imagine everyone wishes that but in the opposite order... all games are "fixed" and then it vanishes. I fear that if it vanishes first, it's a crap shoot if any game gets patched or moved elsewhere post-facto though.

Hopefully the remaining games get some love though for sure!

Personally I'm concerned that by it not completely kicking the bucket that the few stragglers still using the godawful thing won't be in much if any of a hurry to find an alternate solution. There's also the risk that the longer it goes out the less likely some of the stragglers are to even put the effort into finding an alternative (it looks bad if a game is unplayable a few years past release, but many years past release it could potentially be "swept under the rug").

This assumes of course that such companies using the service wont get a non-public behind the scenes NDA notification X months before the service shuts down saying "Oh, BTW, on Julembruary the 34th 2015 we will be shutting down GFWL for good so you should consider migrating any existing products away from the GFWL service and using other services available such as Steamworks. We will keep our servers running until that day." In which case those companies will have some number of months to make the mods to their game to move it away from GFWL and get off of the service before it shuts down. There's no need to abruptly shut down the service to punish gaming consumers and the publishers/developers for choosing to use Microsoft in the first place. That would pretty much upset every possible party out there outside of Microsoft and possibly harm other aspects of their business as well.

They should simply provide a deadline privately and allow the companies to make the change knowing full well the service will come to an end. That gives the companies enough time (presumably) to migrate away from GFWL without causing service disruption to customers. If the companies do not transition away from the service before the announced end date, they either negotiate with Microsoft (pay them) to keep it going longer, or their games cease to have the functionality and the inconvenience to gamers is then on the publisher for not caring enough to update their game - but far less people are likely to be inconvenienced because many publishers will in fact be likely to migrate away safely in time thus mitigating their customers from ever having to have service disruption.

That would be the most sensible way to do it. It isn't necessarily how it will happen in reality, but that's the smart consumer-friendly way to do it and I imagine the way that they would go about it.
The list of games using GFWL still is not that big either, a few dozen:

http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_3rd_Party_DRM_on_Steam#Games_for_Windows_Live

they say you can get the games you bought on GFWL but I still haven't been able to. Kinda bummed had a few good ones on there

I wasn't so much assuming that the publisher won't get some form of notification. Rather, I am just skeptical of the stragglers. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some of them won't put it off as long as possible in hopes of "getting out" of doing anything.

I'm pretty sure that any devs who actually plan to migrate have already done so are at least already working on it and will finish the process no matter when the shutdown will actually occur.