GFWL's saving policy is aggravating. I've played games where GFWL only started up in response to the game starting up about 50% of the time, which meant either juggling about with two different save locations, manually starting GFWL or just closing it whenever it did start up (the easiest, and so the one I went for). Trying to force you to be online to save is also a pain - sometimes I can't be online, so I startup Steam in offline mode, and everything goes great until I find I can't save.

A minor complaint: some developers really put the effort in to design a main menu which really sets the tone for the game, and, especially for darker, more serious games, GFWL going POP with its bright and cheerful skin does jar. Something like Steam, for example, does pop up but in a far, far less obtrusive manner.

Aside from anything else, I can't honestly say I know what GFWL is wasting my time FOR. As far as I can tell I only use it as a profile\matchmaker for multiplayer... so why am I being bothered with it when I just want to play singleplayer? For SP is it just another form of DRM?

At the end of the day, the highest praise for it I can see in this thread is that it works (doing whatever it's supposed to do), which we ought to be able to take as given - and clearly it doesn't work for everyone.

anime avatar ....

It sucks and it's keeping games from Steam, yes fuck it.

1.) Its an extra layer of DRM that is just unneeded.
2.) A number of times, my saves are rendered unusable do to either OS migration/upgrade.
3.) GFWL requires installation of additional software which adds no function for someone.
4.) Requires an added login and online component to an often time single player offline game.
5.) Offline profiles often dont work, and when they do "work", you still need to log in.
6.) Requires a hotmail account.
An additional point for number 2. Aften requires the user to install patches and restart several times before being allowed to play a users game if starting from a clean OS/ one that doesnt have GFWL up to date. Bioshock 2 literally had me restart my PC 10 times because GFWL requires users to download and then install incremental patches.

I don't really dislike it, even if it isn't working from time to time, but it was a pain in the ass to get it working on win 8 -.-

Hello Microsoft employee. How come you're forcing iOS theme into windows now?

OP, I would like to know what do you like on GFWL and what it has what Steam doesn't. Why to have GFWL in my game?

My Dirt 2 experience: "Okay, I need to update my account. Fine." 5 minutes later "Could this be faster?"
My Bulletstorm experience: "Oh, I can't activate my pre-order dlc because the marketplace is down. Lame."
My Dirt 3 experience (and pretty much every game that's at least 1 month old): One week of awesomeness, then the patch came out. GFWL can't download patches for some reason and aborts them at 99%, had to wait for a cracked version >_>
My Batman: Arkham City experience: "This key is already in use." To be fair, this the the publisher's fault and not the GFWL's, but really we could avoid that whole activation thing altogether, couldn't we?
Bottomline: It's not that bad really, but feels pretty unneccesary and some little things just piss me off.

Here's the breakdown, I've included the titles I've had issues with in the parentheses:

1. Horrible region-locking, leading to constant problems with matchmaking (DoW2, BlazBlue).

2. Derived from above, their in-game store is a joke, at least here in Cyprus where there's a grand total of 10 titles as of writing available for purchase.

3. Being constantly badgered for a serial every.single.time I log with my Gamertag on certain games (Gears of War, Fallout 3, BlazBlue).

4. On at least two occasions, having to postpone a co-op campaign for about a week each due to a GFWL update wrecking the service (DoW2).

5. A pain to re-authenticate my computer as a "Trusted PC" -- had some HDD issues and had to do a complete reset (Write to zero's, fresh OS install et al, but otherwise functionally the same hardware setup as before), now I need to wait for about a month for my "old" PC configuration to be de-authenticated so I can make this one "Trusted" and thus edit my account settings.

6. Leaving this one for last as it's merely a minor annoyance personally, it might be a bigger issue for others -- the aforementioned region lock (a.k.a. GFWL does not support your current location) forces me to keep the account to a U.S. address, back from when I was studying abroad; again, minor issue maybe, but valid to many people none the less.

There you have it :)

I don't like to login twice everytime I want to play bioshock 2, and I can't play it offline...
even though I only play the sp

I can say too much about gfwl, i have only 1 game that uses it. The things that are annoying me, in my little experience, are:

1. too slow log in, i have to wait lifes before starting.
2. password length cap, 16 character is too short for my password...
3. sometimes gfwl don't let me connect or play live (it's happened few times but it's happened.

1. Starting a new game = 2 hours of installing useless GFWL-bloatware before getting to play. I've played two GFWL-games on this computer and on both times I had to install loads of crap I don't want to use.

2. DRM - Think about origin & steam and multiply the amount of DRM by 20. That's how much GFWL is having those shitty DMR-things that nobody wants. As an example, I bought Batman: Arkham City and it told me that I can activate the serial key on 5 different computers (format your computer and you lose one charge) and after all of them are used, you no longer own the game. I think that shit is illegal in most parts of the world.

3. Nobody uses it and those who use it are forced to use it. Nobody likes it and nobody wants to use it.

4. It's not practical. You don't want it running in the background like Steam and it's highly dependant to that Xbox Live-thing so to change your profile settings (actually you don't want to worry about this since nobody wants to check your profile) you must do it on the xbox live-site even though you don't own an xbox.

5. It's not reliable. You can't fully trust that the serial key that you have is going to get activated with GFWL like it does with steam.

GFWL is like Origin. Everybody wants it to GTFO of our gaming industry but they just stick there to disturb your gaming. I'm never gonna buy a single GFWL-game after trying Fable III & Batman: AC, no matter how good they are.

GFWL Isn't good at all, especially for people like me, I don't have the best internet in the world so GFWL constantly disconnects me when I try to play games, it's impossible for me to play any internet games on it and it's irritating as hell to play single player ones, it's not all that good looking and it's not smooth to use and all the games with GFWL is unplayable for me and everyone who doesn't have a stable internet connection, I can play every internet game I have flawlessly almost as long as it's not GFWL, that and there is a ton of countries that GFWL doesn't allow some games so you can't even get games there that has it's service..

Their extreme lack of support for the PC gamer.
Calling GFWL support and having them tell me I NEED a Xbox just to change my login E-mail address is bad enough.
Or the fact GFWL doesn't even have their own website anymore, it a VERY SMALL sub area of Xbox.com.

Oh and the boat load of problems people have already mentioned.

GFWL is hated because of how inconsistent and unreliable it is.

Granted- its not as bad as it used to be. But it hasn't completely shaken off ANY of the main issues it has had from its inception- such as constantly dropping online games, and failing or taking forever to update. Again, these issues aren't as bad as they used to be- but they're still noticeably present.

You'd think Microsoft would've been able to patch those problems out after all these years and at least make GFWL even remotely reliable- but nooooooo.