I'm building a winxp system to play older games on. I was looking through my physical collection and paused on Dungeons with the Games For Windows Live banner at the top. Are any of these games still usable or are they basically trashed now? How do I bypass GFWL to play my physical old games?

Pretty much trashed, AFAIK. Another selling point for DRM-free games really.

In some instances you can find workarounds on PCGamingWiki, either fan patches of official patches which remove the GFWL dependency from a game, but I believe they are quite rare.

The service is actually still running, but a pita with Windows 11 (connection error) ... ok, it was a pita under Windows XP as well.
You need to install the GFWL client. But that should be included with your games anyway.


Some games have been moved however. Back when GFWL went closer to it's grave each day, the Batman Arkham games and GTA4 were moved to Steam, offering free copies.



@WinterSnowfall I don't think GFWL is "another" point for DRM free, but "the" one. It was the best example of how not to do it. Only after that people started to realize that DRM was something they might not want to have their single player games connected with.

I would have argued that dropping support for SafeDisc was far worse, but I guess it's just a different kind of DRM lameness.

In 99% of cases it works fine. I'm still playing F1 2011 on a Windows 11 PC. For most games, it's significantly less intrusive than Steam; all you have to do is install the client (which works on modern versions of windows; if you're running XP, the version that came with the game will be fine) and set up an offline profile. Set it to log in to the offline profile automatically on game start (otherwise you can run into save issues).

On a small minority of games (Bulletstorm being a good example) there's some kind of date/release check and possibly a download required to get it working. I can't remember how I did it in the end, but for specific cases, just do a bit of googling (and generally ignore people that say it can't be made to work - as there's usually a way)

Multiplayer may not work (offline profiles and all that), but I've never enjoyed playing against other people.

OK, I specify: Online DRM.
Copy protections on CDs were not seen as such.

The removal of direct hardware access was certainly bad for SafeDisc, Tages and similar products (I didn't really notice, I cracked all my games anyway), but the real problems were caused to sound card manufacturers. From one moment to the next, AWE32/64 and EAX5 didn't work anymore.
Now we have indirectsound which brings at least back surround sound, but all the special effects are missing in these games.

Creative Alchemy brings back the special effects as well - although you need to have a Creative card (theoretically - I haven't tested with onboard, but it's possible there's a workaround), so doesn't help people using onboard Relatek chips.

Yes, I used that as well back in the days, but it was something half baked. It would not work with all games and was only good for DirectSound up to EAX2 or 3 (it has been a while), not for games with native EAX5 support.

I am not even sure it would work correctly with new sound cards (and as you suspect not with non creative cards), since these miss the hardware it would adress and drivers I think usually only support EAX2 emulation. I am not using Creative Labs at the moment anyway, since it has been many years (since the X-Fi2), since they released a internal sound card with discrete 7.1 channel support. They only do 5.1 these days.

It's better to go for SoftOpenAL or indirectsound.
Also for AWE there is a emulation now. Back when the support was dropped, it was very bad however. Croc used AWE to play background sounds, which were then gone. Luckily it was updated to use DirectSound3D later and play the effects using the standard channels.

This.

In the vast majority of them, you can create an offline local account and play without issues. The only really problematic ones are those with the damn release date check, which absolutely never works. Those I just crack (e.g. Bulletstorm).

The real problem on Win 10 is to get the GFWL overlay to show up in the game. Usually requires hunting down some very specific .dll files, but managed to get it working in Batman Arkham City for example, among others.

And yes, definitely preferable over retail copies that were Steam bound.

100%. GFWL wasn't DRM in itself; it was basically an overlay with social features (that also let you do a bit of account management on the same computer). I don't understand where all the hate for it came from - and I was always shocked that when it closed down and games moved to Steam that people were celebrating.

There was a lot of disinformation going round about it at the time - even (formerly - I wouldn't recommend anyone touches PCGamer with a barge pole these days) reputable publications like PCGamer hadn't done their research and just parroted the line that when it was turned off, games would stop working. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of that was planted by Valve to try to undermine competing systems.

Well, you could not call it exactly "stable". Often you needed multiple attempts to log in.
One of the biggies - GTA4 - had severe problems with their own social club. But instead of blaming Rockstar, the GFWL was blamed. And you know how Steam fans are. MS trying what their favorite Shop does? That's pure insolence!
As part of GamesForWindows it's purpose was also to define standards of how Windows games had to be made.

Microsoft had their chance back then and blew it. Now with XBox Live I think they got it right, but too little too late, if you ask me.
And they still like to treat Windows computers as "devices", having specific installation directories, at least now they let you chose the partition and don't put the game files into encrypted directories like the Windows store does.

Many years ago I downloaded a GfW-L replacement. No idea if you can still find it online without getting your computer full of malware. It worked just fine for Fallout 3, which I think is the only game I have which used the GfW-L service.

I'd argue that StarForce was even worse than SafeDisc.

Dev's should really patch DRM out of their old games that often can be had for dirt-cheap - but, you know, they seems to want to turn everything into Games as a Service junk; and/or want to Remaster or Remake everything.

Steam and other wannabe game-clients that ain't often optional; MMO's; games w/ always-online non-sense; and/or games gating specific content behind online access to their servers (cough - Hitman games since 2016) - and other games like those....yeah, that stuff is a major problem when it comes to both the "ownership" and preservation of games that gamers throw $ at.