The GFWL situation is... strange.
As far as I've been able to gather, there was an announcement related to Age of Empires Online last August that stated that GFWL was going to shut down on July 1, 2014. This announcement was quickly pulled. When asked about it, Microsoft only made vague statements about "continuing to support PC gaming in the future" and did not confirm or deny either way.
Since then, in response to the news, almost every single big-name title using GFWL has dropped it and moved to a different platform (usually steamworks). This includes some second-party developers for Microsoft. Throughout this, Microsoft has remained entirely silent.
Now, a week from the date, when specifically asked to comment, Microsoft has made another somewhat vague statement:
We are continuing to support the Games for Windows Live service. As previously announced, as part of the retirement of Microsoft Points the Xbox.com PC marketplace was closed. Although customers are unable to purchase new games from the marketplace or receive title updates, they can continue to enjoy previously purchased content by downloading them through the Games for Windows Live client as usual. We remain committed to investing in PC gaming in the years ahead, and look forward to sharing more in the future.
This has been widely reported as "Microsoft denies GFWL shutting down" but the overall situation is still rather odd. If it wasn't shutting down and it was all a rumour, why did they never speak out to stop everyone abandoning the service en masse? Why have they still never come out and specifically stated "No, it's not shutting down"?
I'll be fairly surprised if it does shut down on the 1st, but not at all surprised if a formal announcement on its demise is made within the next month or so.
On the bright side, Namco-Bandai has made its own vague statement that they're going to continue supporting Dark Souls PC's online, and they're looking into alternatives to GFWL. So it
should be safe.
And I absolutely recommend that anyone who plays Dark Souls does it online. Due to the online being integrated with the entire campaign, there isn't really online vs. single player, there's "the whole game" vs. "the game with several major features it was designed around missing". It's by no means unplayable or
bad offline, but it's an entirely different experience. Same's true for the whole series.