Games for Windows Live - Does anybody use this rubbish!?

GFWL whilst not perfect is nowhere near as bad as some people make out & certainly not universally hated at all. 99.9% of all GFWL issues are security/firewall/ISP/user account privellage settings related on your own PC ;)

If you hate GFWL then the following are all games you can avoid this year as they are all using GFWL:

Dirt3
Fable3
Bulletstorm
Section 8 Prejudice
Operation Flashpoint Red River
Flight Unlimited
Age Of Empires Online
Street Fighter AE
Cannon Fodder 3
F1 2011

I love how GFWL stops pirates from playing online nowadays when a GFWL title uses SSA to link the gamertag to the unique serial number its brilliant I hope ALL future PC games use this DRM. The encypted savegames is down to the publisher/developer not GFWL & only a few games use this but you can nearly always copy/paste them over & just rename the folder to match the online name then it will work. Only Halo2, Gears Of War1 & Street Fighter4 have uncopyable savegames.
 
I love how GFWL stops pirates from playing online nowadays when a GFWL title uses SSA to link the gamertag to the unique serial number its brilliant I hope ALL future PC games use this DRM. T
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errm cd keys stop pirates playing online, gfwl does nothing to stop piracy.
 
Ugh, trying to play Dawn of War for the first time since a rebuild...
Open, Games for Windows Live install...
Restart game
Games for Windows Live update
Restart game
Games for Windows Live update
Restart game
Games for Windows Live update
Restart game
Downloading profile

Thankfully at the end now, but come on...
How hard would it be for them to just install an up to date version immediately?
Installing 3 out of date versions before getting to the correct one just seems utterly insane. Surely Microsoft can do better than this?
 
Well the answer is probably to treat GFWL like you treat DirectX (and your gfx drivers).

Sure, all your games will come with an (out-of-date) version of the DX redist. But who uses them? Nobody. We all get our DX from MS when we re-build our machines.

Same with gfx drivers. Yeah the card comes with a driver CD... but nobody (here) uses it. We get up-to-date drivers from the web.

So it is with GFWL. Need to get in the habit of installing the most recent version from MS, before you go installing your games.

Sure it sucks that the GFWL client is so dumb, but it works that way.
 
I wasn't sure where mine came from as it just installed when I launched it from Steam. I would have thought MS could have sorted the updates out a bit more though. If it only had to do the one update after install, I wouldn't have thought anything of it.
 
Emlyn_Dewar said:
I wasn't sure where mine came from as it just installed when I launched it from Steam. I would have thought MS could have sorted the updates out a bit more though. If it only had to do the one update after install, I wouldn't have thought anything of it.
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Blame the packagers who made your DOW2 DVD's THQ are the ones not including up to date versions of GFWL/Direct X.
 
But why can't Games for Windows Live just have 1 update for older versions?
Having multiple updates in a row is just stupid...

In an ideal world:
Out of date GFWL installation
Update
Finish

Actual experience:
Install
Update
Update
Update
Finish

Microsoft have the resources to add the final polish to an installation. If they really wanted it to be a great experience, they'd sort this stuff.
 
I especially hate the way you have to update GFWL when you install the game and more often than not get caught up in a loop where you end up doing it multiple times. I bought F1 2010 from Steam, which then installed and used GFWL as the client for the game - I would say what I think of that but then it would be censored, big time.;)

Nice integration with the xbox 360 pad though....................big deal lol
 
Liquid said:
I especially hate the way you have to update GFWL when you install the game and more often than not get caught up in a loop where you end up doing it multiple times.
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That's why so many people hate it - their very first experience of it is usually a horrible install / update loop that's really poorly done. For most people it works fine after that, but the damage is done at that stage.
 
Sleepery said:
That's why so many people hate it - their very first experience of it is usually a horrible install / update loop that's really poorly done. For most people it works fine after that, but the damage is done at that stage.
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But it's like this for a lot of games. If I was to re-install CoH now I have to do the same thing and run through each patch one after the other.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a massive fan of GFWL after the damn thing corrupted my save of F1 2010 twice but I don't find the updating any worse than other autopatchers.
 
Well I get annoyed if any game does that too, it's not that hard to query the thing to see what version it's at and select the correct patch from a server to update it to the current version.

It just smacks of laziness, and not giving a damn about what the end user experience is.
 
Emlyn_Dewar said:
But why can't Games for Windows Live just have 1 update for older versions?
Having multiple updates in a row is just stupid...

In an ideal world:
Out of date GFWL installation
Update
Finish

Actual experience:
Install
Update
Update
Update
Finish

Microsoft have the resources to add the final polish to an installation. If they really wanted it to be a great experience, they'd sort this stuff.
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Its no different from other games though. Just install the newist GFWL client direct from the GFWL website BEFORE installing any GFWL game then that's all you ever need to do. No update issues at all now they have sorted the bandwidth out it does not take long at all. The GFWL client is only what 30MB so it does not take more than a few secs to install/download does it.

Yes in an ideal world the publisher should ensure it does this for you but there are countless examples of games which require certain software updated before you can install the game. Steam for instance nearly always installs a version of: vcredist_x86.exe regardless of if its already installed or not as well as updating Direct X everytime............
 
Borrish said:
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a massive fan of GFWL after the damn thing corrupted my save of F1 2010 twice but I don't find the updating any worse than other autopatchers.
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Thats the Codemasters game engine not GFWL doing that same thing happened on Dirt2 as well. Codemasters are well known for not caring to fix this bug (which also happens on the console versions as well). I lost a lot of Dirt2 progress because of it so now manually backup any Codemasters save folders!!
 
AWPC said:
Its no different from other games though.
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Ah but it is. At the end of a tortuous patch process for a game, at least you get a nice game to play.

All going through the tortuous GFWL setup gets you is a useless piece of software that provides absolutely no real* benefit to the end user.

*acheivements aren't real :p
 
Borrish said:
But it's like this for a lot of games. If I was to re-install CoH now I have to do the same thing and run through each patch one after the other.
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But that's the actual game it gives you the value of the game, gfwl seemingly does absolutely nothing but requiring a login, update, irritating crap with saves and and every so often it will pop up and tell me I've done something of note.
 
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