I'm going to build a gaming PC in the not-too-distant future (sometime later this year, waiting for the new cards to be sold at their actual MSRP instead of miles above haha), and I am interested in some of Microsofts games, like Forza Horizon 3 and ReCore.

Now, if I interpretted the Xbox Play Anywhere thing correctly, if you buy a digital copy for any of the applicable games, you get one copy for XBO, and one for Windows 10. Does this mean that my friend who has an XBO, and I could split the cost for buying a game, and he could get the XBO copy, and I could get the W10 copy, without us having to share an Xbox account or whatever? Or are the copies account locked so I would have to use his XBL account to get the copy? iirc, the way ot worked with Quantum Break was that if you preordered digitally, you got one code for a separate W10 copy, with which you could do whatever you pleased, including giving it away.

The game will be tied to your Microsoft/Xbox Live account. You won't recieve a code or anything it'll just add the XBO or PC version to your accounts digital library at no extra cost.

Aww, shucks.

Hoped it might have been like how Quantum Break was, where you got a separate code which you could redeem on any account :-/

Now that it's rolling out to many games and is becoming an established service seems extremely unlikely, Microsoft would lose far too much business if they gave everyone an extra tradeable copy of the game for free.

i don't think there is an official answer anyone can point you to but...

...i'm be awfully surprised if it wasn't locked to the live account. ms (or sony for that matter) isn't in the business of giving stuff away for free any they will put reasonable restrictions in place to prevent abuses of the system. i don't know anything about the win10 store but i believe steam requires you to log into your account so it is reasonable for win10 to enforce the same level of DRM.