Short Thought: Rockstar Loves Games for Windows - Live

A long time ago there was a Windows service that sought to be the perfect DRM -- as all DRM services strive to do. It was called Games for Windows - Live (GFWL), and it linked your save games to your Windows account as well as acting like an Xbox Gamertag allowing you to keep track of Achievements, your friends list and other stuff. It also allowed you to buy games, as this was before Windows 8 introduced the Windows Store.

GFWL was basically discontinued back in 2014 when it didn’t prove to be the Steam-beating solution Microsoft were aiming for. However, the way that it was integrated with games meant that, although it’s no longer updated, if they required your Microsoft account to do anything (such as save the game), you need to do that. Still.

Of course, some developers have removed it from their titles, such as Rocksteady removing it from both Batman Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. Heck, Nordic Games even removed it from Red Faction: Guerrilla, and they didn’t even develop it!

So why on Io did I have to spend a good couple of hours the other night trying to get Grand Theft Auto IV to work on my wife’s PC? Why would Rockstar, a company known for putting out a pretty good product on the regular, leave GFWL in GTA IV?

Never mind the fact that you need a Rockstar Club login, and the fact that it will not work at least half the time you try to log in using it,you actually need it to save. So if you are lucky enough to get it to load -- it kept saying it needed login details for the offline mode, too! -- then you still need a Microsoft login to get to play the damned thing!

Therefore you need to sign up to two new accounts if you want to play the game you bought through Steam, which requires an account or two depending on how you paid. Doesn’t that sound kind of insane? Rockstar imposed their DRM over the Windows DRM, on top of the Steam DRM.

Yes, you can get around it with XLiveLess, which bypasses both Rockstar and GFWL DRM. But why should we have to do that? GTA IV came out in 2008, and GFWL was discontinued six years later -- which was over two years ago now. If some fan can create XLiveLess, why couldn’t Rockstar have done it?