Games For Windows Live closing down.

[bishop5]

So, whilst this is a good thing, there is a rather huge downside.

Story: http://www.pcgamer.com/uk/2014/01/19/games-for-windows-live-will-soon-be-dead-hooray-heres-a-list-of-devs-removing-it-from-their-games/

List of games: http://www.joystiq.com/2014/01/17/games-for-windows-live-is-dying-we-check-the-life-support-of-ga/

So Games for Windows Live is closing, and possibly some of the games using it will not work after unless the Devs release a patch.

I am especially gutted about Dawn of War II - I still enjoy playing that game.

 

[loc978]

Except for the shutdown, most of the complaints about GFWL have no basis in reality. Some people just grew up hating big, bad, evil Microsoft for making them pay for Windows and look for anything to whine about. Others complain about any DRM, again with no valid reason. The truth is that GFWL works perfectly and unintrusively for the vast majority of users.

Odd. The only people I've ever met who could keep a GFWL account working for more than 30 days were people with an XBox Live gold subscription. Personally, I stopped trying after my third username was suddenly invalidated for no reason. Their database was just crap, unless your account was linked to the one that actually printed money for 'em.

...which was really too bad. I kinda wanted to try Age of Empires Online.

 

[barbzilla]

Except for the shutdown, most of the complaints about GFWL have no basis in reality. Some people just grew up hating big, bad, evil Microsoft for making them pay for Windows and look for anything to whine about. Others complain about any DRM, again with no valid reason. The truth is that GFWL works perfectly and unintrusively for the vast majority of users.

Lol, apparently you never played on some of the worse implementations of GFWL. It got better in the later years, but even then it didn't work well over many online structures. Now for server implementation it was fine, but if the game used player based servers for small games (I.E. 2-4 people) the system would flutter about and people would have massive connection issues (see Dark Souls for an example). To add to that, there were other people that couldn't get GFWL to work properly on their Windows 64bit computers for years, with still others who were unable to run it due to it needing a specific version of .net (and other programs they would run for work, school, ect ran with a different version, and you could only have 1 at a time).

To further complicate matters, to update GFWL (in the early years) required a full uninstall of GFWL, reboot of your machine, and then installation of the new GFWL followed by a second Reboot (to do it properly). The whole system was flawed from the start, and never did come through on their promise of integrating games and windows functionality with xbox live service and functionality. The closest to this they came, was with Windows Media Center and Xbox Live, but that had nothing to do with GFWL.

So yes, while it worked great for some people, it was complete crap for others.

 

[Ratty]

Except for the shutdown, most of the complaints about GFWL have no basis in reality. Some people just grew up hating big, bad, evil Microsoft for making them pay for Windows and look for anything to whine about. Others complain about any DRM, again with no valid reason. The truth is that GFWL works perfectly and unintrusively for the vast majority of users.

Just because you and/or the people you know personally haven't had a problem with GFWL or DRM in general yet, it doesn't invalidate the experiences of the thousands of people who have. The whole concept of limiting what a user can do with a copy of something they've bought is distasteful. What if after buying your new couch you were only ever allowed to move it into one house, or weren't allowed to ever change the pillows? What if there was a feature that would make the couch fall apart at the seems if you tried to sell it or give it to someone else later? It's absurd and it doesn't slow down pirates in the least.

All DRM does is 1. Impress tech illiterate investors that the company is "trying to do something about piracy" 2. Lessen the ability of customers to resell their games when they want to. 3. Work as a form of planned obsolescence. While making legitimate customers jump through hoops pirates don't have to.

 

[PPB]

I can't say I ever had any issues with GFWL, though the only games I played that had it are Fallout 3, Fable 3 and Dark Souls. I don't think it ever was a good service (let alone a relevant one), but I do think that the hate bandwagon was excessive.

Anyway, I'm a bit sad about Fable 3. It wasn't a great game and I've only played through it once, but it's one of those situations when I felt content knowing that I could play it again if I ever wanted to, even if the chances of that are slim. As was said by Calm Sands, DRM showing its ugly head again.

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

Sad about Dirt 2 and Dirt 3, I really liked those games.

There also others to be sure, but those still hold a place in my heart as some of the finest racing games available on PC.

 

[MysticSlayer]

Except for the shutdown, most of the complaints about GFWL have no basis in reality. Some people just grew up hating big, bad, evil Microsoft for making them pay for Windows and look for anything to whine about. Others complain about any DRM, again with no valid reason. The truth is that GFWL works perfectly and unintrusively for the vast majority of users.

I was going to respond properly, but I think I'll spend my time working through GFWL's clunky interface and retrying to get the damn service to let me download all the DLC I've bought, because it absolutely refuses to let me, even when it recognizes that I own it. After that, I think I'll start trying to see if the system used to validate a few of my games has started working. I'll then try to get some of my online games to actually function properly and not lose connection every 15 seconds. But of course, before all of that, I'll have to hope it recognizes my profile and then sit through two hours' worth of updates.

But once all that is done, I'll get back to you with a proper response of why I hate GFWL so much.

OT: Sort of sad to see that people are losing some of their games, at least if the developers have no plans to remove them from the GFWL service before it comes down. Unfortunately, I doubt this we'll start seeing any companies move away from DRM use in the future because of this. Best-case scenario is they all go to Steam.

Long term, though, I think this is better because now developers won't be using the shitty system any more.

 

[A-D.]

So, whilst this is a good thing, there is a rather huge downside.

Story: http://www.pcgamer.com/uk/2014/01/19/games-for-windows-live-will-soon-be-dead-hooray-heres-a-list-of-devs-removing-it-from-their-games/

List of games: http://www.joystiq.com/2014/01/17/games-for-windows-live-is-dying-we-check-the-life-support-of-ga/

So Games for Windows Live is closing, and possibly some of the games using it will not work after unless the Devs release a patch.

I am especially gutted about Dawn of War II - I still enjoy playing that game.

I made a thread that covered this. It was locked because people started talking about cracking the games which is piracy on these forums.

So... you might want to add a rule to not talk about cracks.

Isnt that redundant though? As far as i was aware, the removal of GFWL, for which i am glad honestly should technically only affect any multiplayer part of a game, so that kinda sucks for Operation Raccoon City given its multiplayer-focus, but games such as Fable 3 are perfectly playable even without GFWL, or at least i never actually had to start GFWL and simply made a offline profile..which sadly doesnt work for Dark Souls so i have been unable to play it ever since i purchased it since it keeps crashing on startup for some bizarre reason and gfwl refuses to install properly.

The Redundancy comes that usually cracks kinda invalidate online play since online play is tied to a key and account, and you can only have one key per account, so if you used a crack to get it working you still could only play the offline mode which the shutdown wouldnt affect, at least i hope the games which arent patched, such as Fable 3 dont suddenly stop working because GFWL shuts down, aside from the online component. Plus, legally speaking, a crack isnt technically piracy, since you still need a game for that and downloading the game is technically piracy, the crack is just a modified EXE-file which is useless on its own.

Course if the discussion is nothing but "well lets all get a crack to play our games"..yeah that could be a problem, but then again if you own the game and suddenly become unable to play it it kinda falls into the abandonware-category of legal arguments. Imagine if you had one of the games on the list which are going to be not patched and you couldnt play it anymore, you suddenly have a game you can no longer play.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

Yeah it makes me quite sad that I can't play and won't ever get to play Fable II and ORC online on PC, I guess majority whining about a system can in turn fuck over some games that people already have, basically fuck over a few people and who will care?, not the gamers that aren't affected and certainly not the devs and MS and Capcom.

 

[Auron]

Except for the shutdown, most of the complaints about GFWL have no basis in reality. Some people just grew up hating big, bad, evil Microsoft for making them pay for Windows and look for anything to whine about. Others complain about any DRM, again with no valid reason. The truth is that GFWL works perfectly and unintrusively for the vast majority of users.

It wrecked a lot of games by asking PC players to pay a fee for automatch and other basic services when it launched... It's obstructive and wonky, the servers are functional but the lobbies are worse than gamespy's. Really, the point of GFWL was making PC players pay yearly fees and having more games available on Xbox, it failed and it was terrible, majority of games that used it tanked with the exception of the ones released in the last few years.

 

[Qvar]

Except for the shutdown, most of the complaints about GFWL have no basis in reality. Some people just grew up hating big, bad, evil Microsoft for making them pay for Windows and look for anything to whine about. Others complain about any DRM, again with no valid reason. The truth is that GFWL works perfectly and unintrusively for the vast majority of users.

Do you have an idea of how long took me to play Bioshock 2, and I still have no idea of what did it use the connection for?
It (GFWL) updated itself SIX times, every time would make me restart the game and put my login and pass again, even if I told the damn thing to remember them.I was about to give up thinking that it was 6 updates, just a recursive one that could never get completed, when it finally did.

And the interface, which I've used only for Dark Souls (those are the only two games I've used GFWL with), sucks.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

Except for the shutdown, most of the complaints about GFWL have no basis in reality. Some people just grew up hating big, bad, evil Microsoft for making them pay for Windows and look for anything to whine about. Others complain about any DRM, again with no valid reason. The truth is that GFWL works perfectly and unintrusively for the vast majority of users.

I second this. I've had less issues with GFWL (none at all) than with Steam, Origin and Uplay. It works just fine and isn't intrusive at all.