I think his point was that you mentioned Batman and Bioshock specifically, all of which have had GFWL fully removed.

Well I mentioned them because they had, and I saw that as a positive omen give how proactive their owners were. It was only after months going by of not seeing anyone else do the same that I became more pessimistic about the direction.

Ah, I get it.

Well very few GFWL games actually require the GFWL program to work or go online to play singleplayer. I would guess a lot of games are going to be left as-is, because singleplayer is still playable and nothing else is really guaranteed to work forever. I could be wrong though.

Still nothing in regards to GTA 4 and Dead Rising huh? Shame :(

Rockstar and Capcom suck, no surprise there.

Does that mean Universe at War will be completely unplayable after the GFWL shutdown? I have that game, but i haven't played it yet. I mean, they could have left the game as long as they put a BIG warning saying that multiplayer doesn't work anymore.

I think I read somewhere that Nordic Games was probably going to remove it from Red Faction: Guerilla. As they seems to keep selling the games for which they bought the licence/IP, I think it will be done some time in the future.

About the fact that we'll be able to play the games with an offline account once the service is shut down: yeah, but what about online activation ? and what when a new version of Windows is release where we can't install GFWL ?

It is only a matter of time before those games get unplayable. I reminds me I still have to play Dead Rising 2... I hope Capcom will have a smart move and convert it to Steamworks. I get that it is difficult for them to calculate the benefit of doing that kind of work but they should really take in account the customer relationship.

HAHAHAHA, you still expect something good from Capcom? Forget about it. Capcom doesn't even know what customer relationship means. They'd rather make a new version of SF4 (i bet the next edition will be called Super Mother Fucking Street Fighter 4 2020 Arcade GOTY Edition with Lasers) than fix an old game.

With lasers?

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition is being migrated to Steamworks on May 30; all product keys now activate on Steam. See the Capcom blog post for details.

There is no mention of what will happen to the original Street Fighter IV.

I just noticed that Bulletstorm is back on Origin. It was removed in March.
No idea if that means anything... Maybe EA plans on switching from GFWL to Origin? (Just throwing out wild speculation...)

I'm not sure if you have it on Steam or GamersGate, but I bought it on GamersGate and I can install and play it without any internet connection whatsoever.

That sucks of course (especially if the future incompatibility comes only from the DRM or client, and the game would otherwise work fine on the new system), but that is more about "future support" than retroactively removing one's ability to play the game. Even many GOG games will most probably not work in future Windows editions, or newer hardware and drivers.

I personally am more concerned about e.g. a client stopping supporting older OSes, retroactively removing your ability to play your purchased games on the system and OS for which you originally bought them. Especially since at the same time they don't guarantee that the affected games will run fine on newer OSes either, so depending on the game you may end up in a nasty catch-22 situation:

- You can't install and play the game on the older OS anymore because the client doesn't run on that OS _anymore_.

- On the other hand, while the client works on a newer OS, the game itself might have compatibility issues there.

=> suddenly you can't install and play the game anywhere anymore, even on the system/OS for which you bought it originally.

the only thing GFWL actually did was tracking your achievements so what's so hard to just patch it out like they did it with Batman's Arkham Asylum?

There shouldn't be too much concern about the games that do not get GFWL officially removed, because MegaGames usually has unofficial fixes for things like that. It's not legit in the strictest sense, but it's not piracy by any means. They're a very good website that I had used for well over a decade to remove DRM, like no-CD patches, for retail games that I had owned. I haven't been there in a while, but I'm assuming that they are still very high quality.
In some cases that was all it was used for, however GFWL also was used as DRM and game activation in some cases. I believe that it also had a feature for always-on DRM, but I can't list sources since I stayed away from almost all of these games.