Tag Archives: GFWL

Games for Windows LIVE gets me over a barrel.

Last night my friends and I wanted to play some Dawn of War II. I bought the game sometime last year and it’s been installed and running perfectly on my PC. I start the game on Steam and it tells me that a Windows LIVE update needs to be downloaded. I wait for the blue bar to finish and I get a message that says I “may” need to restart when finished. Dawn of War II closes and I get dropped to desktop with no further explanation. I repeated this update process about 5 times with the same results. I then tried to install GFWL (Games for Windows LIVE) gfwlivesetup.exe

Games for Windows LIVE needs SP3

Oh I see. So now I can’t play a game that I paid $50 for – on my stable SP2 XP machine. The machine that played this game perfectly fine a few months ago now needs SP3 or else. There is no work-around and no way to bypass the service pack check. (Although I would bet money that if the SP check were removed from the installer, it would function fine.) No, I see this for what it is: Microsoft forcing their OS upgrades down your throat. I have two choices: Upgrade to SP3 for the next 3 hours and figure out what it broke over the next two weeks, or uninstall Dawn of War II, and play it on my new Windows 7 PC I’m planning to build in a month. OR MAYBE I’ll never re-install it and never buy another “Games for Windows LIVE” game again.

Either way, instead of a fun game night, Microsoft has ruined it and made me think twice about their product offerings. Thanks Games for Windows! 😀