Games for Windows Live will soon be dead (hooray!), here's a list of devs removing it from their games

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RIP Games for Windows Live, we hardly knew ye. On second thoughts, we knew ye pretty well, and we hated your malodorous guts - good riddance. Of course, with Microsoft's hated games service going the way of the passenger pigeon (I was going to say dodo, but a load of animals have sadly been made extinct since then), there's the little matter of what's going to happen to all the games infested with GFWL. Will they be playable after July 1st, when the service is being taken out to the woodshed to be shot in the head? It's still unclear, but it doesn't seem likely - unless developers take it upon themselves to patch their games.

There's good news and bad news. Mostly bad, I'm afraid. The good news is that Super Street Fighter IV / SSFIV Arcade Edition, DiRT 3, F1 2010, F1 2011, Red Faction Guerrilla and Ms. Explosion Man will all replace GFWL with Steamworks (or in the case of RF:G, perhaps a DRM solution of its own), their respective developers have confirmed to Joystiq.

The sorta-good news is that Namco Bandai are "exploring options" to removing GFWL from Dark Souls and Ace Combat: Assault Horizon. If they don't remove it from the former at least, I imagine there'd be one hell of a stink come July 1st.

The bad news is that the Dead Rising and Lost Planet games, Resident Evil 5, Street Fighter X Tekken, Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising and Red River, Iron Brigade, Fable 3, Gears of War, Halo 2, Blacklight: Tango Down and quite a lot of other games currently have "no plans" to remove GFWL. See my 'one hell of a stink' comment from earlier and insert the word 'massive' in there somewhere.

Joystiq are "still awaiting response" about GTAIV, Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2, Bulletstorm and a few other games. You can read the full list of games here . Thanks, Joystiq!

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.