I knew about the 'gaming zone' but at the time I played multiplayer across serial (shoutout to radioshack having everything I needed). A few years later when we got broadband, I just used direct IP. Still working today, no hassle other than either port forwarding or setting a vpn between machines. Will take direct IP every time over Live or other services that will eventually die (hello Gamespy; at least I can use a hex editor to use 3rd party GS servers).

Kind of - the MS Store is, still, absolute garbage. When FH3 launched, I order it on the store since that was the only option. I had to uninstall and reinstall the name no less than two dozen times during it's lifecycle, because of bugs that would corrupt game files. Still, 10 years later, there are only some games that allow you to verify files. After buying 3, 4, and Halo Wars 2: never again.

Oh, and 4 won't launch for me now, for some reason. I remember it being a widespread issue with no official fix. 3 works, but pc multiplayer is broken, and they are aware but will not fix it. You can watch other players on the map, but cannot see or interact with them in the world. Total bs. For 4, they introduced a slew of bugs right before the steam launch, and never fixed them (many remain in 5 and 6, ffs), since 5 was less than a year from launch. And HW2 has/had an issue where it would play fine for ~20 minutes, lock up, and crash.

Quality programming, truly. It's not like the company that makes the operating system should be able to make software for that operating system. That's so silly. Meanwhile games from the 90s and early 00s that were developed by Microsoft still work well, some 30+ years later.

Bonkers.

Claiming the store releases are usable PC releases and any customer ought to be subjected to them... eh.

I mean the idea is kinda cool, I give them that. But the technical implementation is so shitty, it actively makes buying a game that is on sale on MS Store but not on Steam on Steam instead of MS Store a good value proposition. For one, your savegames don't need an external tool to decrypt like wtf MS?!