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I'm giving up. I spent the last few hours trying to login to Games for Windows LIVE. If you don't know what this is:

Games for Windows LIVE is Microsoft's attempt to compete with Valve's Steam platform and their "achievements" by bringing their XBOX Live platform to the PC.

The last time I managed to login to Games for Windows LIVE, I couldn't even have a custom profile picture without signing up for an expensive premium membership. On Steam, you get this for free.

But that's not enough. When you play a game which supports Games for Windows LIVE and you have this thing running in the background, it will most likely create a new player profile and all your previous savegames will be gone. If you are lucky, you "just" have to manually copy all your savegames to the new profile and it might work.

Games for Windows LIVE also grants you access to "downloadable content" (DLC) for games such as Fallout 3 and Mass Effect. I'm buying my games on Steam, including those that support Games for Windows Live. I can't see why I have to buy DLC through Games for Windows LIVE when using Steam. As a matter of course, the otherwise useless Games for Windows LIVE client has to run in the background for DLC to work. This means that people like me who bought their game on Steam need to have two programs running in the background to run a computer game.

But since all I get when logging in is "Code: 80048823", I can't use any of the DLC. I changed my password since their support websites which are spread across at least 20 different domains told me to do so. While looking for information regarding "Code: 80048823" on different Microsoft websites, I encountered several redirections, at least one "500 Internal server error", one endless redirect loop and a lot of "404 File not found" errors.

Talking about downloadable content, it's certainly worth mentioning that the only currency supported by Games for Windows LIVE is Microsoft Points. You can buy Microsoft Points in a store in the form of a points card (I've yet to find a store here in Germany where they sell those) or you can use a credit card. That's it. If you don't have a credit card (not that uncommon here in Germany) and you can't find a store, you are out of luck.

That's the reason why there are online shops which sell the scanned codes from the cards. I was lucky enough to find a shop which accepts payment through PayPal and direct debit.

I therefore come to the conclusion thatGames for Windows LIVE fails.

Update: The solution to this problem can be found here: Games for Windows LIVE "Code: 80048823" solved